Second writing rant
Warning: I get really, really passionate about writing software.
If you are writing using Word or Pages or Google Docs or some knockoff of those because it's what you have always used, then don't fool yourself, you are fucking sabotaging yourself. They are designed for producing office publications. Not long-form writing, and not short stories. For the sake of not putting in some time to get the hang of something else, you are wasting so much time and effort fighting the software it's not funny.
There are so many alternatives.
For long-form organisation of writing, I like Ulysses best, but it is subscription only now, which is a pain. (I like to buy outright). It's also Mac only, and my Macbook is unhappy. But it is so, so lovely, for writing, for document management, for everything. Minimalist AND full featured.
Scrivener is an outright purchase now, though, and is less ugly than it used to be. The note cards and outline view are awesome. It used to be my go-to before my conversion to writing in markdown.
Bibisco is free/premium and is just a beautiful writing environment if you like to track characters, timeline and scenes and ALL THE DATA.
For actual text production, I like clean, minimalist and Markdown. And there are SO MANY free or text editors. Also, they play much more nicely with AO3 than Word, Docs etc, because most can copy/paste in HTML. And some minimalist markdown software (like Ulysses) makes it trivial to make beautifully formatted .mobi, .pdf, .docx, .epub or whatever you want documents. Take that, Word and your stupid styles.
Draft is the very best web-page text editor for collaboration, version control and beta-ing, and it's free, although I did choose to subscribe because it's simple, customisable and I use it every day. It also does great stuff like track when you are most productive.
For desktop, Typora is a WYSIWYG markdown text editor and is just so damn pretty and useful and thoughtfully designed. I love it so much I could die. And it’s FREE.
On a phone, I like iaWriter (also has a desktop version and is good for collaboration) and Pure Writer (love the customisable soft keyboard taskbar). Train yourself to write on a phone, and you will never be without a way to fill spare moments.
Right now for longform original work, I write on a variety of minimalist markdown text editors according to mood, and will pop the chapters in Ulysses to export in manuscript form.
But find what you love best. Just don't stick with what you use at work/school because you are afraid to experiment.
Here are some links to start exploring.
https://alternativeto.net/software/scrivener/
https://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-word/
https://alternativeto.net/software/ulysses/
