Here are the apps I use most often as a professional writer. I’m not including any “business” apps here, just the ones that help me get words out into the world.
This app is expensive, but has been worth every penny. Something about the interface just makes the process of putting words on the page truly enjoyable. I write all of my blog posts, notes, essays, and just general brainstorming in here. Often I’ll use it to write scenes for my novels as well, though it’s not great for organizing long-form projects, so the scene ultimately gets pasted elsewhere.
Created by author Hugh Howey, this is a newcomer on the writing app front. I’m giving it a shot for my current work in progress, and so far I'm loving it. It still has a few bugs, but I'm assuming stability will improve as development continues. As of now, it's poised to replace Ulysses (which I've fallen out of love with) as my go-to novel-writing app. If I were to create my own “dream writing app” it would loo basically exactly like this.
Okay, so this one isn’t a writing app, but I wouldn’t be an author without it. As my longtime task manager, Things basically runs my entire life. It's how I track which scenes to write each day. It reminds me to wash my sheets every Sunday when I’m on deadline and my brain is mostly mush. It’s where I dump new story or blog posts ideas. My grocery list goes in here. I’ll put little daily reminders to myself to keep my head on straight. I even use it to manage my inbox; if an email comes in that I need to deal with later, I drag it into Things, assign it a date, and then archive the email. I also love that Things can pull in calendar events, so I use it as my "daily dashboard."
Freeform
I previously used Milanote for all of my pre-writing, brainstorming, and mood-boarding for my novels and loved it. But after waiting years for them to offer the offline support that’s listed on their roadmap, I’ve given up on them and cancelled my pro account. There were just too many instances where I needed to access my story notes on a plane, train, or somewhere without reliable Wi-Fi, and couldn’t because of Milanote’s reliance on the internet. I’ve now switched to Freeform, which doesn’t have as many features as Milanote, but is free for all Apple users, really beautiful, and has that all-important offline support!
Pages
Another free app for Apple users, I use this when co-writing with Anth. It can sometimes get a little laggy/slow when the document gets past 50k or so, but it’s the best I’ve found for collaborative writing that also offers offline support.
I hate this app. 0/10 do not recommend. I only use it in the very final stages of my manuscripts, and only because it's the industry standard in Big Publishing and required for collaborating with my publishers. But it is a part of my process (albeit under duress), so it's on the list.
Apps I’ve Tried But Aren’t For Me
Scrivener — I did write a couple of my early books in Scrivener, but ultimately it’s too clunky for my tastes. It also doesn’t have a great cloud-sync solution, which is a deal-breaker for me since I write on my Mac, iPad and even sometimes my iPhone. The app is powerful though, I’ll give it that!
Living Writer — It’s primarily web-based, which is a hard no.
Dabble — I can’t even describe why I don’t like this app, for some reason I just don’t feel creative or inspired to write when I’ve tried to use it. I like writing apps that feel like they “get out of my way” and this one doesn’t.
Ellipses — Has a ton of promise. I’ll check it out again whenever they release a native Mac version.
Butter Docs — I actually collaborated early on with the creators of this one, but they went in a different direction than what I was looking for, and it’s really unintuitive for me.
Highland — I love this for writing screenplays, and while they do offer a novel template, they don’t offer the option to export a novel manuscript .docx?! They may have fixed it, but the fact that they even pretended to be an option for novelist without .doc export made me lose all faith in them. As mentioned above, Word is industry standard, so there’s not much we novelists can do with a PDF or .rtf.
Ulysses — This was my ride-or-die writing app for a long time, but it’s felt increasingly bloated and unreliable. I can see going back to it someday, but more and more often I was finding myself opening iA Writer instead.
