M Corbett
Scribe
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.
What's Obsidian?
Writing by hand? I’ve forgotton what that isI 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.
Like the tomes of old.Writing by hand? I’ve forgotton what that is
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?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?
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.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!
Amazing, thanks for this run down.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).