Sylvia Writes

I have tried all the popular writing apps. And failed at all of them.

My last failed experiment was with Ulysses. I added all the writing projects I'd like to do this year and the sorting projects I'd love to do as well and was immediately overwhelmed.

I opened it to write something for my novel and I lost the words because I was distracted by the list of writing projects I still hadn't finished.

So... something had to give.

I started to use Bear, my favourite notetaking app, for my novel and something clicked.

Turns out, I don't need all the bells and all the whistles to write/edit.

Just one window, in a font I like, with one scene or one story is all I need.

Bear is great in its simplicity. All I need to make folders is to add a hashtag. Adding a hashtag with a slash, like #novel/todo sorts all my novel's todo lists in a subfolder for my novel.

I keep the folder structure simple.

I have a blog folder for a list of ideas for my blog.

I keep a maximum of three writing projects in Bear. Currently those are: my novel, a journaling project and a couple of short fantasy stories I want to edit and submit.

And everything else is in my inbox folder, with subfolders for easy access.

My simple folder structure keeps everything manageable and, most importantly, it keeps me from being instantly overwhelmed.

I know I could have created a similar folder situation in Ulysses (and Scrivener), but both of those apps are simply too heavy for what I need in this stage of writing.

Everything else I've ever written is in Scrivener. If I want to do some sorting of poetry for instance, I go there and open my poetry file.

That is doable. If I don't want to work on sorting my poetry or old blog posts, I don't need to see them as a visual to do list reminder either.

To me, Bear is a sigh of relief in app form, simple, easy to use and with all the things I need to manage my writing.