Friday, February 04, 2005

An Alternative to Word

During NaNo I heard people talking about using Rough Draft to write their novels on. Now that I have so much time on my hands, I downloaded it and played around with it. It's a decent word processor and I'm sure I missed many of its useful features. I could really see my mom using it. She is chronicling family history; Rough Draft would better suit her hodge podge writing style than MS Word is. For myself, I don't believe I would ever use it. One, I just got a Psion Series 5 from ebay. It is a seriously fun PDA that I wish I had known about when they were first released. The Psion deserves its own separate posting, which I'll have tomorrow. Two, I spent some time as a desktop publisher using Word. As a result I know more about styles and formatting techniques than anyone really wants to know. But it means that I have Word totally pimped out on my PC and would have to spend serious time to create the same effect with Rough Draft. Finally, I don't think like Rough Draft is set-up to be thought with. In other words, the note taking feature, the multiple files if page or chapter breaks are required. My brain is hard wired to think like I store my files. At my old age I don't know if I would be able to switch. But, if you like the idea of having an electronic notepad to store with your story, and tend to write your story in piece rather than sequentially, Rough Draft might just be for you. If Microsoft drives you crazy, Rough Draft might just be for you as well. It does somethings better, like printing multiple files with one click.

1 comment:

Cybele said...

I used RoughDraft this year to do my NaNovel for the first time. I enjoyed the notepad feature but I really missed the autocorrect from MSWord. I tend to write from beginning to end, all in one file.

I'm writing a play right now and even though RD features auto formatting, I'm back to MSWord.

It's just as easy to use a paper and pencil next to the computer or the native notepad program on the computer to keep track of things.