4 Wonderfully Helpful and Free Apps for Writers by Emmanuel Nataf

By: Emmanuel Nataf of Reedsy LTD

Get your writing done

Sure, you could chop an apple using any moderately sharp object. But chopping an apple with a freshly sharpened, high quality knife will make the process a lot smoother.

You don’t need more than a pencil and paper to write. But tools and apps can help you organize your thoughts, stay motivated, improve your prose, and store your work for you. More than that, they can also make the process of writing a book more attainable and less daunting. That mentality shift might be all it takes to help you become a great writer.

The following four apps are all free and straightforward. They will help your writing done. Period.

The Pomodoro Technique

Developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s, the Pomodoro Technique is meant to improve productivity and time management through the use of one simple tool: a kitchen timer.

Traditionally, the Pomodoro Technique sees a person working for 25 minutes then taking a 5-minute break. This is repeated over and over until the task is finished. After four sessions (AKA “pomodoros”), take a longer break and then begin again. Ensure that before you begin working, you clearly state the task at hand and that it’s something that can be accomplished in the time you have. For instance, don’t make your task “write a book.” Make it: “write 1,000 words.”

If you don’t have a physical kitchen timer, Tomatoes is a web-based app that will help you “pomodoro” your way to a finished book.

Hemingway app for perfecting your prose

You’re sitting at your desk, and have just finished writing a passage that you’re not totally sold on. You try reading it aloud to your dog, but it has no helpful feedback for you. You’re about ready to give up on your writing session when Ernest Hemingway appears and offers a hand with reviewing your prose.

If this sounds like a dream come true to you, you’ll be happy to hear that an app that aims to emulate this exact situation exists. It’s called Hemingway. It is a very basic word-processor — except for the fact that as you write, it reviews your writing for:

• adverbs suggesting you use strong verbs instead)
• qualifiers (such as “perhaps” or “probably” — and it suggests you remove them)
• instances of passive voice
• hard-to-read sentences.

Evernote for research and planning 

If your pockets or bags are constantly filled with notes scrawled on bits of paper, receipts, and napkins, you might want to consider a more organized way of assembling all of your thoughts and notes. We mean no slight to the old-school methods! We just know the feeling of losing that one napkin. The one containing the brilliant lightbulb idea you had the day before and now it’s completely gone from your mind.

That wouldn’t happen with Evernote . Evernote is an app that lets you take notes, save online articles or other pieces of research, and record audio notes. You can create shared access for other people if you’re collaborating on a project. And the best part is, you can sync all of this information across all of your devices.

To prove how helpful the app can be to the book-writing process, the company’s General Manager wrote his entire book on Evernote.

Reedsy book editor app for writing

There are so many writing apps out there. Some come with a feast of bells and whistles meant to help you along the writing process. Others are paired down to the extreme to help you focus on just writing.

We think a good writing app gives you a little bit of both. If you’re writing a book and you’ve already gone through the preliminary planning stages (outlining your book, mapping out your narrative arc, plotting the character arcs), then you do want somewhere you can “just write.” But it doesn’t hurt if the app offers a few bonus functionalities that won’t distract you from the task at hand.

And on that note, let’s take a look at the Reedsy Book Editor.

How Reedsy works

The Reedsy Book Editor (RBE) was built to help authors format their book once the writing process is done and the author is ready to export their manuscript into EPUB or Mobi for ebooks, or PDF for print books. (And if you’d like to convert an EPUB into a MOBI, there’s a tool for that, too!)

That being said, the RBE also a wonderful choice if you simply want to get words down on paper. It was created especially for the purpose of writing books, and will transform your first draft into a polished-looking manuscript before your eyes. Its functions include:

• Creating chapter splits.
• Adding comments (which is helpful is you’re having someone else look over your work).
• Find and replace.
• The ability to add images, end notes, and scene breaks.
• Versions —  if you deleted a paragraph yesterday and you want it back, simply go back to that version and copy and paste the paragraph into your current version.

For instance, if Lewis Carroll had decided to pen Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland using the RBE, this is what the first few paragraphs would have looked like:

Remember that the world’s best apps for writers won’t actually do the work for you: you’re going to have to do the writing yourself. But resources like the above four can make that task more feasible — and not to mention more fun.

About Emmanuel Nataf

Emmanuel Nataf is a founder at Reedsy, a marketplace and set of tools that allows authors and publishers to find top editorial, design and marketing talent. Over 3,000 books have been published using Reedsy’s services.

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