If you’re a writer, you know that it can be tough to stay organized. You might have an enormous amount of research material, dozens of ideas brewing, and a ton of work to catch up on—all while trying to keep track of the time you spend working. I’ve collected some apps that will help streamline your writing process and make tracking your work easier.
Table of Contents
Best Apps For Writers Iphone
Book writing used to be a very difficult business to get into, often being more about who you know rather than what you know. Nowadays?
Well, it’s still difficult, but nowhere near as difficult. What makes it easier is book writing apps, which can help you to plan your story or have a place to write and get some guidance on your content.
1. Scrivener
Scrivener is a highly comprehensive app that aims to assist writers as much as possible. With a UI (user interface) that makes dragging and dropping friendly and simple, Scrivener allows you to work on individual sections of your book and even switch around where chapters are placed.
You can put comments, footnotes, links, and highlights on any selected text, insert images, see your word and character counts, and import PDF and media files. The app utilizes Dropbox to make it quick and easy to move a manuscript between different devices.
You can export to a variety of formats, even exporting to a ZIP compressed folder. It also allows you to take screenshots of previous versions so that you can cross-compare after making changes; which is especially useful if you’re struggling with nailing a particular chapter and have multiple ideas of how it can go.
Download: Scrivener ($19.99)
2. LivingWriter
LivingWriter is quite a simple app with a fun and sleek UI. It allows you to write your stories and make notes to assist with your story. When inside a story project, you can write Story Notes, Story Elements, Chapter Goals, Story Goals, and more. The app makes exporting to PDF and Word quick and simple, meaning you can add to a story while out and about if you think of an idea, and then export it to Word to continue on a different device when back at home.
The app even allows you to add a Cover Image to the stories, which is a nice touch that helps with the aesthetic of different stories. Compared to the other writing apps on the list, LivingWriter could be seen as being a little simple, but its strength comes in how easy it makes it to break down your goals for the story. Its formatting options are comprehensive enough to give you everything you need while writing a book via your phone.
Download: LivingWriter (Free)
3. Story Planner for Writers
Coming up with ideas for stories, or even just individual chapters, can be difficult for even the greatest writers. Story Planner for Writers aims to make this easier for you through its intuitive outlining features.
The app has dedicated sections for outlining characters and locations. It even allows you to add images to improve the aesthetic and help get you into the zone. Through its color-coded feature, you can separate plot lines to help keep them straight in your head.
Its Progress Bar feature helps you to ensure you’re remaining productive enough on a daily basis, tailored to your own desired output. It also offers stats that help to illustrate through data how your story works.
Download: Story Planner for Writers ($5.99)
4. Writer Assistant (Wassi)
Writer Assistant (Wassi) works much the same as Story Planner for Writers, but while it doesn’t boast as many features as the latter, it has a free version and holds enough features to be useful.
Through the top menu, you can work on different aspects of a project—with tabs for Characters, Locations, Stories, and so on. And, on each tab, whatever you’re working on will be broken down into further tabs that can help you really flesh out a location or character.
Writer Assistant allows you to Save and restore backups, and you can also export to PDF, as well as change the theme of the app to make it look the way you want it to. These extra features are helpful if you work on other devices and want to plan your story on the app and then transfer it over to another device to begin writing it.
This app is great for planning out your story and nailing the different aspects of it all—plot, characters, locations, and so on. The way that it breaks it all down can help get your creative juices flowing and simplify the task of planning your novel if you’re struggling to get started.
Download: Writer Assistant (Wassi) (Free, in-app purchases available)
5. Ulysses
Ulysses is one of the most popular book-writing apps around, and for good reason. With a sleek, highly responsive UI and design that is based on simpleness, you can get straight to creating content and worry about the details later.
Through Sheets, you can write different stories through the app and can set them to sync via iCloud. Ulysses makes it easy to sync to your iPad or Mac, meaning you can use the app when out-and-about to add some ideas or write some of your stories, then continue on a larger screen when you’re back home.
On the text editor, you can add Headings, Dividers, Blockquotes, and more through the hamburger menu. On the Formatting tab, you can add Annotation, Videos, Footnotes, and Comments amongst other things.
The most impressive feature of Ulysses is its Revision Mode, which makes suggestions on how to improve your text such as spelling, grammar, word redundancy, and typography. This feedback is helpful for writers of all skill levels. Finally, the app is available in over 20 languages—so it’s more than likely accessible to you.
Download: Ulysses (Free, subscription available)
6. Storyist 4
Storyist 4 is also a very popular writing app and for good reason. It combines the principles of the other apps featured (book planning vs book writing) in a way that feels natural and simple.
When creating a project, you can work on the actual manuscript and get straight into writing the story, or you can spend some time outlining the Characters and Settings. You can also add Images. The novel templates make it easier to get started, especially if you’re struggling with writer’s block or feeling overwhelmed. While the Characters and Settings templates are a little more barebones than Story Planner for Writers and Writer’s Assistant, the fact you can plan or write all in Storyist makes it a very convenient and helpful tool.
Storyist also offers a great deal of formatting and sectioning options for your text, but they can be a little difficult to find for beginners, being featured in the sub-menus of an already bloated menu. This is something that will impact you less as you become more acquainted with the software.
Download: Storyist 4 (Free, subscription available)
best novel writing app for ipad free
Google Docs (free)
This wouldn’t be much of a list without the Google Suite’s writing app. Google Docs may lack the crazy features of some of the other options on this list, but Docs has everything you need for most basic writing tasks, including full formatting, support for images, and spell checkers. But the real strength lies in its online nature. It’s completely free, but despite that, you’ll get instant syncing so you can work on your document at the same time as other people and see edits and additions in real time, and it can import from and export to pretty much every format you’ll possibly need. While it’s a bit bare if you’re writing a novel or a screenplay, this is the ultimate note-taking tool, and one of the best completely free options available.
IOS
Microsoft Word (subscription)
It’s the classic app we all know and love, and probably the program we all immediately think of when anyone says “word processor.” Word comes with a number of templates for different styles of document, handles images, and has a full formatting toolbar to boot. Word is effectively Microsoft’s answer for Google Docs — except you have to pay for it. Regardless of that, if you already have an Office subscription, Word is a strong option with support for importing from and exporting to many formats, cloud-based storage, and real-time editing with collaborators, plus the advantage of being the word-processing program of choice for many professional editors.
IOS
Ulysses (subscription)
The first app in this list to really push itself to “writers,” rather than people who just need to write, Ulysses is a strong contender for the app for serious writers. You can keep almost anything in Ulysses, including your screenplay, novel notes, a to-do or shopping list, or even your blog’s latest post. There is a strong spelling and grammar checker, it syncs up with the MacOS version of Ulysses, and it can even export as an e-book. Unfortunately, you won’t get this for free, and Ulysses requires a subscription to work. It’ll set you back $6 a month, with discounts for year-long plans — but if you’re serious about writing, Ulysses is a good investment.
IOS
Scrivener ($20)
Possibly the most powerful single tool for writing, Scrivener is one of our favorite writing apps. It costs an upfront $20, which is a lot of money for an iOS app, but for that price you get a solid writing platform, a place to keep all your research (including images), notes on characters or locations, and a useful “corkboard”-style view for your chapters, which allows you to view everything at a glance, or even move individual chapters around easily like you would on a real corkboard. It exports to e-book and other popular formats, and syncs up with the MacOS version — though you’ll need to buy that too. Still, even with those added costs, Scrivener is the real deal.
IOS
Jotterpad (free/subscription)
Jotterpad’s aim is to provide a writing app without the distractions of a traditional word processor, and it does this extremely well. The interface is simple and extremely streamlined, but even with that, it’s not lacking in features. You’ll find all the usual additions, including Markdown, Fountain, a spell checker, and more. There’s even a rhyming dictionary. You can start up your document as a novel, screenplay, blog, or editorial piece, and you can jump between Jotterpad on different devices, thanks to its syncing. However, you’ll need a subscription to access most of the features on offer, including cloud syncing. A year’s subscription will cost you $30 a year.
IOS
Werdsmith (free/subscription)
Writing should be addictive. At least, that’s what Werdsmith believes, and it has the tools to hopefully inspire you to make writing a part of your daily routine. It uses writing tracking and daily goals to push you into keeping up a streak and jotting words down every day. Heck, it even has an Apple Watch word-counting app. If you struggle to keep writing, this may be the iPad writing app for you. Other than that, it has a decent number of features, including novel or screenplay writing tools and cloud syncing to keep your work current. There is a subscription, but it’s purely to allow you to work on more than a set number of documents at once, for $5 a month.
IOS
Compo (free)
Compo is a brutally simple writing experience that aims to deliver a quick, easy way of writing down whatever’s on your mind. While some other apps may want you to set up a project and a template before you start, Compo just opens a blank page and lets you at it. Although it’s something more of a note-taking app, it’s certainly good enough for more heavy-duty writing tasks. You can share your writings on a number of different services and social media sites, and it syncs up with iCloud as well.
IOS
Shortly: A.I. Writing Assistant (free)
We’ve left the, well, weirdest until last. Shortly is a writing app with a difference — it has another tiny writer caged inside it, who learns from your writing and pens their own additions to your story when asked. All right, so it’s really an A.I., but Shortly’s writing assistant is actually pretty good, and it’s the perfect tool for getting over a small writer’s block. Using your past pennings as a template, it’ll take the reins and type away, adding new ideas and story turns you might not have thought of. While it’s unlikely to finish your story for you, it’s a great way to get the creative impulses firing up again. Worth a download and a try, even if you’re using another app.
Conclusion
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