Looking for an editor for your story? Notepad, Word and Googledocs are too little, and Scrivener, Manuskript and yWriter are too much? You like Word-style text editors to write stories, but with larger stories it becomes difficult to restructure it. You have tried Scrivener-style editors, but you hate how you need to set up so many things before starting to write, and you feel uncomfortable editing your story scene-by-scene, you'd like to add things here and there.
How about trying MaweJS?
Writers can be coarsely divided to two types: pantsers and planners. Pantsers start writing the story and let the flow take them anywhere it goes. Planners (or sometimes called plotters) first make plans and outlines before writing the story.
Pantsers are fine with Notepad or Word. Planners are catered with dedicated tools like Scrivener and its alikes like Manuskript and yWriter.
But there is third category: plantsers. These writers are something between pantsers and planners, and I happen to be one. I just start writing the story like a pantser, but at some point I start making plans and restructuring the story like a planner.
Sadly, neither Notepad nor Scrivener fully support plantsers. That's why I needed a tool for myself, that's why I wrote Mawe with Python/GTK, and now with ElectronJS, Javascript and React.
Live screenshot while editing one of my stories (written in Finnish):
At topmost, there is the selection of view. Below that is a toolbar to change settings in the editor. The main editing view contains three parts: (1) index of the draft, (2) editor display, and (3) index of notes.
A new feature is showing a pie diagram of the story, and compare it to selected template:
There is currently K. M. Weiland's story structure templates and Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet, but we may add more later. It wouldn't be bad, that you could have a collection of different templates for various purposes (thrillers, romances, etc).
Install the needed tools, if you don't have them already. On Linux you can do that from command line, on Windows you can get the installation packages from web:
$ sudo apt install git
$ sudo apt install npm
Clone the repository:
$ mkdir mawejs
$ cd mawejs
$ git clone https://github.com/mkoskim/mawejs.git
Get dependencies:
mawejs$ npm install
Running (development version):
mawejs$ npm run dev
If you update the project with 'git pull', you may need to update the libraries, too:
mawejs$ git pull
mawejs$ npm install
Instructions to get React DevTools working: #131
Check out discussions page for status and other info:
https://github.com/mkoskim/mawejs/discussions
You can test MaweJS with example files located in examples/
https://github.com/mkoskim/mawejs/tree/master/examples
Mawe is meant for writing stories - not press articles, blog posts, technical documents or anything else but stories. That means it has tools to split the text mass to somewhat manageable pieces, and keep "meta text" - plans, sketches and such - together with the final result (story itself).
See also: https://github.com/mkoskim/mawejs/wiki/Short-history-of-MaweJS
MaweJS is the third generation of my homebrew story editors:
-
moe (Markus' / My Own Editor): Once I started writing stories, I wrote them in one text file. I started to split them to multiple pieces, and I wanted an editor to collect them together to form a draft. Repository: https://github.com/mkoskim/moe
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mawe (Markus' / My Advances Writer's Editor): Written with Python/GTK. The main feature between moe and mawe is that mawe not only joins story pieces, but it allows you to edit them as one big bunch. Repository: https://github.com/mkoskim/mawe
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maweJS: mawe written with ElectronJS, NodeJS and React. I realized that Python/GTK is not going anywhere, it is used to write firmware software to Linux, nothing else. The improvements in GUI are made in the JavaScript front.
All these editors are backward compatible, that is, files made with older versions can be loaded to newer ones. Also, I have something like 200-300 stories on my disk, written with various editors, and I really want my new versions to load the older ones.
Plantsers are something between pantsers and planners. So MaweJS - aimed for plantsers - is something between Word and Scrivener.
Mawe's main design principle is "Just start writing" - you should be able to start writing your story right after starting the editor just like opening a notepad. Some structured editors need considerable work before you can start writing. Basically you need to structure your story beforehand, before starting to write it.
All the tools that later help you to keep track with the text mass are taken into use just when you need it, without need for configuring them beforehand. Thus, you don't first create scene list, but you later split text to scenes. You don't need to write synopses or tag scenes, until you feel that you need them.
Editors made for writers to write stories differ from regular word processing software by
-
They keep metadata - comments and such - together with the story,
-
They are meant to produce a manuscript.
That is, they are not exactly meant to edit some files, but they are meant to edit file or files which are used to produce a manuscript. They are generally not exactly word processing software - they are more like text management software.
Most software meant for writers keep document as a tree, and let you edit the nodes (text blocks). Once you are fine with the result, you click a button to export a manuscript.
My first story editor, Moe, worked exactly like that. The problem I felt is that you loose the track of big picture, when you are editing your story one scene or chapter at a time. I wanted an editor, which is somewhere in-between the two worlds:
- Structured editors (yWriter, Scrivener)
- Mawe
- Unstructured editors (Notepad, Word, etc)
What Mawe does is that it keeps the story internally as tree-like structure, but it "opens" it for editing, as a some sort of a draft. It keeps track of changes so that it can parse it back to tree-like structure anytime needed (e.g. for organizing parts, analyses and so on).
I have borrowed ideas from code editors, for example, how they do code folding, syntax highlighting and such things.
There are certain things I would like to address in this version.
First, the old Mawe is written with Python/GTK, and thus it mainly works off the shelf only in Linux machines. At the time it was written, it was still huge improvement compared to software written in C++ or similar, which would need porting and compiling them to all supported platforms.
Even thought Python mawe was a huge improvement to older versions, the truth is that GTK is not going to improve anymore. That means that Python/GTK GUI will probably not get any big face-lifts anymore, instead it will probably only be used to develop Linux accessory software.
Implementing the editor with ElectronJS should greatly improve this side. I have also planned integrating the editor to cloud storages (Dropbox, gDrive), so that you could access them wherever you have internet connection.
In this editor version, I try really hard to concentrate on fluent user interface.
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