Should I write my novel in Obsidian?

[M Corbett]

I've been using LivingWriter for my book but I also started using Obsidian for notes. The more I learn about Obsidian, the more I wonder if I should just use it instead.

 

[Queshire]

What's Obsidian?

 

[pmmg]

I don't know. You really don't need any of those things. You can write a whole novel just in notepad if you want.

Many of those writing tools come with a lot of ways to store notes and such, but some of them are just overkill to me.

Living Writer looks a lot like Scrivener (which I use). I dont know much about obsidian.

I dont think the difference between my best and worst writing has anything to do with which tool I typed it in. Sometimes those tool are just extra burden.


Taking a cursory look at obsidian on youtube, I do see the user there had something for marketing, so...if the tool somehow helps with marketing, it might be worth having. But....I suspect it just another organizing tool. I am not sure why it would be more special than others.

 

[pmmg]

Looking up living writer....Is it a subscription? I would dump it just for that.

And Obsidian is the same, but cheaper unless you buy the addons. Personally, I would stick with Scrivener. I have enough stuff that makes being profitable harder.

 

[Penpilot]

In the past, I spent a lot of time looking for the "perfect" writing program. I would think if only I could find that program, I would finally be able to write properly. It wasn't until I gave up on that quest and started dedicating that search time to simply writing and using the simple tools front of me did I start to make real progress. I wrote my first novel in Word. And as I was writing said novel, I came to realize, I don't need all the extra fancy stuff to write. Can it be helpful? Yes. Is it necessary? No.

Right now I use Scrivener. It's more than enough for me.

 

[M Corbett]

What's Obsidian?

Obsidian - Sharpen your thinking

Obsidian is the private and flexible note‑taking app that adapts to the way you think.

obsidian.md

 

[A. E. Lowan]

We use Microsoft 365, but as a collab our needs are a bit schizophrenic. We need to be able to work together in shared documents in real time, be it OneNote for the notes and bolts or Word for drafting time. Occasionally Excel gets pulled out when a spreadsheet is called for, like tracking ages and births over time (we write an Urban Fantasy series that is a multigenerational family saga). Word is the industry standard and we stick to it for a lot of reasons, and while OneNote is the lesser known app, it's really versatile. Great place to keep a series bible of any size.

This is a very small slice of what we've done with ours.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Oh! And then we have Canva. Big recommend for marketing materials and covers (some do it, we don't because I'm just not that cool, yet.)

 

[The Dark One]

I've had five novels published and all were written in word.

If you're disciplined and organised with your notes, then word is all you need.

All I need anyway...

 

[Mad Swede]

I agree with The Dark One. I use Word, admittedly with some very specialised add-in tools to sort out the text errors caused by my dyslexia.

Tools like LivingWriter, Scrivener, OneNote and Obsidian can make organising things a little easier but in my experience they are in no way essential to my writing. I could write my novels by hand, just like Dickens and Tolkien did. Using Word just makes my writing legible and (mostly) correct in terms of grammar and spelling.

 

[M Corbett]

I guess I’m not looking for reasons to use Obsidian as much as I’m looking for reasons not to use it. Unlike most of the things above, it’s free. So maybe a more useful comparison would be to Google Docs or Pages?

 

[Finchbearer]

I agree with The Dark One. I use Word, admittedly with some very specialised add-in tools to sort out the text errors caused by my dyslexia.

Tools like LivingWriter, Scrivener, OneNote and Obsidian can make organising things a little easier but in my experience they are in no way essential to my writing. I could write my novels by hand, just like Dickens and Tolkien did. Using Word just makes my writing legible and (mostly) correct in terms of grammar and spelling.

Writing by hand? I’ve forgotton what that is

 

[pmmg]

I cant even read my own handwriting. Its pretty bad. Ill stick to word.

 

[M Corbett]

Writing by hand? I’ve forgotton what that is

Like the tomes of old.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

I guess I’m not looking for reasons to use Obsidian as much as I’m looking for reasons not to use it. Unlike most of the things above, it’s free. So maybe a more useful comparison would be to Google Docs or Pages?

Bearing in mind that there's no such thing as a free lunch, I'd look very closely at any word processing program that claims to be free out one side of its mouth and then states it "adapts to the way you think" out the other. Makes me ask two questions. 1) Who's making money off of this and how are they doing it? Ads? Selling your information? Leaving tasty little presents in your system to remind them by? And 2) Does anyone else catch the thinly veiled reference to this being an AI? What can it do? What are you responsible for contributing to its code? How far into your system can an AI burrow to tailor itself to your needs?

"Free" can be very attractive, especially when we're young and just getting started in life and in writing, and this doesn't really change much because it's hard to eat ink. But, just as a bit of general good advice, pause before clicking, think it over, search it looking for both the good and the bad, and only when you're satisfied that the price is worth the app should you download anything.

Good luck and godspeed!

 

[M Corbett]

Bearing in mind that there's no such thing as a free lunch, I'd look very closely at any word processing program that claims to be free out one side of its mouth and then states it "adapts to the way you think" out the other. Makes me ask two questions. 1) Who's making money off of this and how are they doing it? Ads? Selling your information? Leaving tasty little presents in your system to remind them by? And 2) Does anyone else catch the thinly veiled reference to this being an AI? What can it do? What are you responsible for contributing to its code? How far into your system can an AI burrow to tailor itself to your needs?

"Free" can be very attractive, especially when we're young and just getting started in life and in writing, and this doesn't really change much because it's hard to eat ink. But, just as a bit of general good advice, pause before clicking, think it over, search it looking for both the good and the bad, and only when you're satisfied that the price is worth the app should you download anything.

Good luck and godspeed!

Thanks for the words of wisdom. In this case I think I’m safe - you host it all yourself (none of your info goes to Obsidian) and only have to pay for a sync service if you want. There is no built in AI.

The main caveat seems to be when using community plugins, including AI ones. Nothing guaranteed with those.

 

[pmmg]

I dont see any harm in just giving it a try. They pretty emphatically say its fully featured and free unless you have two or more ppl.

I would suspect they really dont want to never get money so….

But maybe its the thing for you.

Seems not much different from scrivener to me though.

 

[Scarface Claw]

I use Obsidian MD for both work and play, and it's a great piece of kit for organising notes with a massively knowledgeable community and an almost endless amount of customisation. I also pay for Sync but it is entirely useable without it.

Whether it is the right system for you time will tell. Best of luck!

 

[Prince of Spires]

There is only 1 real test, and that is to try it of course.

A few things to consider:
How is it for back-ups? Is it easy to store a copy in a different location from the computer where you have the program or are the files more or less stuck inside the program? After all, computers can die, and usually do so at the worst possible time. You don't want to lose all your writing.

How easy is it to store the text in a different format? This is important simply if you want to do anything with your manuscipt (for most places you'll need either Word or PDF). But even more so if Obsidian would either go bankrupt, be aquired by a different company, or just change their format. You could simply lose access to your writing just because the company makes a decision.

An extension of this to consider is how well your files can still be read in 10 years time. Note, this is an issue with pretty much all IT solutions. However, if you haven't touched a tale for 10 years, can you still open it in Obsidian? My wife had some issues with a holiday photo book app, where they changed the internal structure of the files and suddenly she couldn't open a file anymore and had to start over. Not a big deal for a holiday photo book perhaps, but it's very different if it's your 300k word epic trilogy.

Lastly, how well does it perform for longer texts. Most programs I've used work fine for texts of 5k-10k words. But they very often slow down if you go a lot higher. This tends to be the case for most programs not designed specifically for novel length works. 75k words is a lot for a program to handle efficiently it turns out. Now, you can create a separate file for each chapter. Many people writing in Google docs do, and a lot of novel specific software like Scrivener and Atticus do this by how they're set up. But it's something to consider.

All these are reasons for me to stick to Word. It's the gold standard in text processing, which means everyone I would want to send my story to can open it. It's easy to set up back-ups to multiple locations, and to auto-save (and recover) files. I can still open Word files from 10-20 years ago, though even there I might run into issues with special characters and their encoding. And it has no issue handling longer texts. It runs as smooth with an 80k word file as with a 5k one. All in all, it would take a lot to get me to switch (though I do use Atticus for formatting the ebook / print pdf of the novel, just because they make it look pretty without any hassle).

 

[M Corbett]

There is only 1 real test, and that is to try it of course.

A few things to consider:
How is it for back-ups? Is it easy to store a copy in a different location from the computer where you have the program or are the files more or less stuck inside the program? After all, computers can die, and usually do so at the worst possible time. You don't want to lose all your writing.

How easy is it to store the text in a different format? This is important simply if you want to do anything with your manuscipt (for most places you'll need either Word or PDF). But even more so if Obsidian would either go bankrupt, be aquired by a different company, or just change their format. You could simply lose access to your writing just because the company makes a decision.

An extension of this to consider is how well your files can still be read in 10 years time. Note, this is an issue with pretty much all IT solutions. However, if you haven't touched a tale for 10 years, can you still open it in Obsidian? My wife had some issues with a holiday photo book app, where they changed the internal structure of the files and suddenly she couldn't open a file anymore and had to start over. Not a big deal for a holiday photo book perhaps, but it's very different if it's your 300k word epic trilogy.

Lastly, how well does it perform for longer texts. Most programs I've used work fine for texts of 5k-10k words. But they very often slow down if you go a lot higher. This tends to be the case for most programs not designed specifically for novel length works. 75k words is a lot for a program to handle efficiently it turns out. Now, you can create a separate file for each chapter. Many people writing in Google docs do, and a lot of novel specific software like Scrivener and Atticus do this by how they're set up. But it's something to consider.

All these are reasons for me to stick to Word. It's the gold standard in text processing, which means everyone I would want to send my story to can open it. It's easy to set up back-ups to multiple locations, and to auto-save (and recover) files. I can still open Word files from 10-20 years ago, though even there I might run into issues with special characters and their encoding. And it has no issue handling longer texts. It runs as smooth with an 80k word file as with a 5k one. All in all, it would take a lot to get me to switch (though I do use Atticus for formatting the ebook / print pdf of the novel, just because they make it look pretty without any hassle).

Amazing, thanks for this run down.

Obsidian looks good on all those points, which is encouraging.

All my work is saved automatically to Google Drive, and I have a periodic automatic back up to Dropbox.

In terms of file size, the format is Markdown which is the most efficient format size-wise and pretty universal. The length should be no issue.

The Pandoc plugin can then transform files into most other formats, including Word and PDF.

As you say, all I can do is give it a go but it looks good from a technical point of view.