Wrighter: Novel Writing

Wrighter is a novel writing app for the whole of the job: drafting your book, and then the self-editing pass where a novel actually gets made. Every scene gets a Wrighter score out of 100 for the things an editor would mark. I have written about 500,000 words over twenty years, and for a long time very few of them got finished. The apps I wrote in were good at getting a first draft out of me and no help at all with what came next. I would open a manuscript, not know where to start, and close it again. Wrighter is what I built when I stopped believing that was a discipline problem. The drafting comes first, because it is where most of a book gets typed. There is a full-screen view with nothing arranged around the edges, a sprint timer you can set by minutes or by word target, a write-forward mode that stops you climbing back up the page to rework the last paragraph, and a manuscript organised into chapters and scenes that you can drag about when the order turns out to be wrong. The write-forward mode is there because climbing back up the page to rework the last paragraph is how a chapter comes to take four months. Then every scene carries a Wrighter score out of 100. It finds things an editor would mark: clichés, adverbs propping up weak verbs, passive constructions where an active one was available, the same distinctive word four times on a page, filler, filter words, telling where you meant to show, sentences that have got away from you, and a good deal more besides. It knows “let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding”. The score matters less than what it hands you, which is somewhere to start when you open a finished draft with no idea where to begin, and a way of knowing a scene is done rather than merely that you are tired of it. It will not tell you whether your story is any good. Nothing can, and I would keep your money away from anything that says otherwise. Wrighter deals with the mechanics and leaves the story alone. Where you disagree with it, you win. Flag a phrase as deliberate and it stops costing you points, permanently, and your overrides collect into a style sheet that follows you from book to book. This is roughly the arrangement you would have with a good editor, who marks the phrase and then lets it stand once you have said you meant it. The scoring is a set of written rules worked out by arithmetic on your own machine. There is no AI anywhere in the app and no call to any AI service, which is why the same prose gets the same score every time, and why every mark can be traced back to a rule you can sit and read. Nothing you write leaves your device unless you switch sync on, and your licence covers every platform either way. Sync exists so that your own devices can see the same manuscript, and if you leave it off I am not backing your work up, so keep your own copies. British spelling is handled properly, colour and realised and travelled and all, and American spelling just as properly, and you choose which one you are writing in. Your book exports to plain Markdown from every platform at any time, and if you stop paying you keep read access and export permanently. Nobody loses a novel because a card expired. One purchase covers Mac, iPhone, iPad and Windows on every tier, including the monthly one, and any platform Wrighter adds later is covered by the same licence on the day it lands. Seven days free on either subscription, then £1.99 a month, £19.99 a year, or £49.99 once. There are no sales, so there is nothing to wait for. Wrighter is made in the United Kingdom by one person. Many an amazing book never made it past the copy editor’s red circles. Wrighter brings the mechanics. You bring the story.

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