Novelist 4+

Useful for drafting

There is a lot you can do with this app to collate ideas. I love how it keeps track of how much you write in a day.

It wasn’t entirely intuitive. I cant figure out how to reorder scenes. You can move sections under new parent sections but not easily reorder the scenes within them. The word processor doesn’t let you indent paragraphs as you write, only in the viewer mode later. The exporting formats are super basic.

This isn’t the program that you will finish your novel in, but for keeping track of ideas while writing your first draft, it deserves four stars.

Developer Response ,

Hi, you can long tap list elements to open a new interface where you can reorder them. I just finished my third 80k-words novel inside Novelist and it just needed some little adjustment in post production. Happy writing!

Very well thought out app and perfect for most writing needs

Truthfully, I don’t know a great deal about how this app performs with writing text. This is not because of any negative reason within the app, it’s simply because I didn’t know this existed and started using the familiar Microsoft Word (as buggy as Word is). Though, from what I have seen and tried out, it looks like it does a fine job with writing. The only thing that stands out is the fact that there is no font selection or other customisations, but that isn’t a dealbreaker.
Regardless of that, what I love most about this app is the organisation aspect. There are so many details in the “plot” section that are there by default; you can add character relationships, coloured tags, location, chapter dates, and pretty much anything you want. Having somewhere to list chapter and character information in a neat manner is very good.
It’s everything I wanted when I was wishing for an app that I could use to organise information for my novel and I wish I found it sooner.
Thanks!

Very helpful!

I’m the kind of writer that likes to create lots of fluff and backstory before actually writing, and this has led to hundreds of scattered files all over my devices. I had given up using apps or programs to help, because they either weren’t robust enough, weren’t user-friendly enough, or just plain got in the way with all the options and buttons and customisation options. Novelist is a happy middle ground; simple and elegant design and format, flexibility without being silly, and well organised. Ultimately, this is an excellent place for keeping all the ideas, characters, places, notes etc. in one place.

Developer Response ,

Wow, thank you soooo much for your kind words! 😊