Manuskript.

Most people don't know it. It's software for writers. Software with lots of options, while being a lot simpler than Scrivener. I know loads of authors live inside Scrivener, and hooray for them, but it's too much, big, complex, confusing for me.

Read about Manuskript etc at their homepage. There are screenshots and a list of features. This post, and perhaps another one, will go into how I use it, to give you an idea.

Note: Manuskript is Free Software. You can use it without paying for it (although a donation is always appreciated by the creator), and if you feel like it, you can even change it.

Starting the program.

So. What do we see when we start Manuskript.

At a fresh start, the File menu will let you open a file, quickly open a recently used file, or quit. That speaks for itself. To create a new story, we use the Create button. Before we click there, we can select the type of story we want to set up, using the options at the left, under Fiction, Non-Fiction, or a Demo Project.

For example:

Say we want to create a novel with 20 chapters, 5 scenes each, 500 words per scene. You can tweak this, of course, and add/delete scenes and chapters as you go. Click "Create", save the file somewhere and named it.

Then we can enter the metadata, the info around the story:

This should speak for itself. Type the title and all the other bits you find necessary.

What did Manuskript set up for us.

In the Outline option, we find all the chapters:

As you see, there's a goal of 2500 words defined per chapter. For each chapter you can enter a 1-line summary and a 'few lines summary' (not highlighted as I hadn't selected a chapter yet).

In the Editor option, we find the chapters and scenes as well. This is where the writing goes on:

Click a scene and you can write:

Using F2 (I'm not sure what that is on a Mac computer), you can change the name of the selected scene or title.

On the right hand side you can add a short summary of the scene, for quick reference if you need to look up something (via the outline view).

This is all the basic stuff you'd need to get writing in Manuskript. In a next post, I'll go into setting up the summary, the characters and plots, and the world options.

Something to know: Manuskript stores all your writing as plain text files. It uses "markdown" coding for e.g. bold and italics (*this would be italics*). All files and scenes are stored as separate files on your drive. In a later post I will show you how to save a story in one zip-file, if you feel that's smarter, easier or better.

Thank you for reading this far.