The Best Writing Program I've Tried

I tried posting this in Author Deals, but apparently that’s only for the cool kids. It doesn’t show up as a space I can post in.

So, short version: I’ve been using Deckle as my go-to writing program for over a month and it’s been amazing. I absolutely love it. And I would say the same thing even if they hadn’t given me an affiliate code. Buuuuut since they have, and apparently Thomas doesn’t have one (I didn’t see it in the list, anyway), you can use my code to get an additional 10% off until the 8th. After that, there’s no discount.

And there’s a much bigger discount right now: it’s currently $107 rather than the $197 it will be next week. So if you combine it with my code, it’ll be 50% off.

Really, I don’t care about the code myself. Since there’s no benefit to anyone other than myself, after the 10% goes away I’m going to be barely pushing the affiliate link. Yeah, getting the cut is nice, but I’m serious: I would be saying all of this without the program.

I’m currently traveling and so I can’t do the carefully-written post going through the features in detail that I want to give you. I have to do it all from memory. But I’m going to give it a shot.

Even when it was much more buggy several months ago, I thought this program had a lot of potential. Now, though, I’m really feeling its absence. I’m traveling and had to leave my laptop behind because it just wasn’t worth bringing. I use a setup with a wireless keyboard to make my phone a laptop replacement, so I knew I’d be able to do a lot of work without hauling a laptop around. But I started really feeling that absence the moment I got my keyboard out on the plane. Deckle is such a smooth experience that working on my phone feels clunky now. I hadn’t realized how much my workflow already depends on the program until I was completely without it. No “put this in a file and add it to Deckle tonight” right now, no “I’m typing on my back porch but I need to duck inside to check the notes I left in my Deckle project” — I’m not getting back home until next week.

So let me go through what I’m missing, and you can decide if it’s a good pitch or not.

Outlining and Discovery

My wife and I are both using the program. I’m an outliner, she’s a discovery writer. (She calls it pantsing but I’m a little older than she is and that word meant something very different in elementary school.) So we have very different methods when it comes to drafting. I need to have a roadmap, she just keeps typing. Deckle is built for both.

It’s not exactly unusual for a manuscript-focused program to be able to separate things by chapter and scene and easily move them around, but Deckle makes it very smooth. When my wife writes, she hits a stopping point, starts a new scene, and worries about chapters later. That can wind up being a lot of work on the back end, trying to balance out what chapter goes where, but she can’t just stop in the middle of it, select a few pages of text, and then judge by word count if she’s “supposed" to be at the end of a chapter now.

But for her, the word count meter means she knows how much is in a scene. She can quickly click to see how much is in the total chapter currently containing that scene. She can move that scene back when she realizes she forgot something. She can click twice and start a new scene without losing her current flow. Another two clicks can switch a scene to be its own chapter or vice versa.

On my side, I no longer need a separate document for an outline. The sidebar on the right side (it’s called the Inspector panel in the program) has a tab for both Synopsis (what happens in this chapter/scene) and Notes. I can put in however many notes I want in there, more than I could justify in the outline document. I can put whole dialog bits I wrote down, rather than keep them in a third document specifically for that chapter.

And being able to do it not by chapter but by scene means that I can turn the order of chapters and scenes in the left-hand side panel (the Binder) into the actual bullet-point list I need to keep things straight.

Overview Mode

I forget what it’s actually called right now. It’s the icon with four squares on the left. Sorry, this is a very unprofessional review. :)

But I’m calling it Overview Mode right now because that’s what it does. Click on that button and we can see the folders, parts, chapters, and scenes arranged as little cards, with space for the synopses and word counts. Click on a folder and you can see what’s inside, or just see what the total word count is in that folder.

When I was doing Author Arsenal with Jonathan last month, I put all of my work there into one folder so I could see just the word count from that challenge. I also have part of my next book in a folder of its own in the same project because that way I can make certain that book two flows from book one the way it needs to. (That way my book two outline isn’t in yet another document as I add to it. Then I can copy it over to a new Deckle project when the time comes.)

The card view is the default setting, but you can switch it over to a list. That can be more helpful for some tasks.

I can also tag and color different folders, chapters, etc., with different colors. So, for example, I can tag a chapter as needing improvement just by coloring it red; then I know I need to get back to that one when I have done the research I need for a particular plot point.

Comments

Comments are also very easy in this program, which means I’ve been testing out editing. There’s no feature like Word’s Track Changes or Libre/OpenOffice’s Record yet, but the developer says he’s hoping to add it in later. Most of my editing work is in comments, so I’m testing it out using my wife’s next manuscript. Not being able to correct typos and misplaced punctuation is a little annoying, but survivable.

But one feature that I like about it is that it’s a ‘competing’ tab on the right hand panel (the Inspector) with Synopsis and Notes. This means that I can use comments in a way that I’ve always wanted to but couldn't becuase they were too visually distracting: commenting on my own first draft. Just being able to quickly create a comment like “check name" or “insert description here" has really improved things. I don’t have to bury it in the Notes panel. I can use it as a self-editing process right there on the first draft.

Productivity Tracker

The productivity panel is one of the better ones I’ve seen. It’s lightweight, unobtrusive, easily brought up and easily dismissed. The most recent update even added in a sprint timer. You can set it for a number of minutes, hit go, and keep writing. I personally haven’t decided if I like that better than using my phone, but I know a lot of other authors would prefer to not have to touch their phones at all during a writing sprint.

But there’s a different reason why I am whole-heartedly switching to this feature rather than my phone: it also means that the tracker won’t just track how many words you wrote per day and what your daily stream is. It will track how many minutes you’ve been sprinting in a day. I don’t have to log each one individually in Excel or try to remember it at the end of the day (or the next day).

The Codex

Now, I’m not jumping into the Codex with both feet at the moment, but I’ll explain why in a moment.

The Codex is a really useful feature that’s been introduced in the last month. It’s basically an encyclopedia for your worldbuilding. If you’re working on a story that’s got a lot of details that need to be kept straight, this works about as well as Obsidian or World Anvil unless you’re really getting into the fancy details.

I’m not quitting Obsidian yet, but this was part of my feedback to the dev: my current recommendation is that if you’ve got a lot of complicated stuff that goes over the course of a series, which doesn’t show up in all books and especially if it includes information that might show up in a book but you mainly added it to develop the stuff that will go in the book, then use a wiki like Obsidian as your primary reponsitory. Then resere the Codex for the details you are actually putting in the book. This way you can just make a reference in the Codex with all the stuff you need per book, use Obsidian for the rest, and move on.

The Codex is also useful for on-the-fly tracking, so that you can put in the details you just invented five seconds ago before you forget them.

You can also use this to tag individual scenes and chapters for characters so you can keep track of who’s in what part of the story.

Formatting

I haven’t played around with formatting very much, but before I decided that I would just move over to my phone as a replacement for my increasingly-senile laptop*, I was seriously considering getting a Mac just for Vellum.

(* I’m going to sidebar here to give Thomas a break and acknowledge two of his arguments as being highly persuasive. One, he recommends to never use a phone for writing. Two, he recommends just ditching Windows for Mac for multiple productivity reasons.

I will be very upfront and say I just plain don’t like Macs. I know it’s a stubborn emotional thing. But Thomas has a very logical, rational argument in favor of using a Mac that really almost convinced me despite my stubbornness. If it weren’t for the phone angle solving multiple problems at once, I probably would have done it either this year or next. I encourage you to look at Thomas’ tech guides and not skip over the Mac sections, just to give the arguments a fair shake. Deckle has a Mac version, too.

And the reason I use my phone for this is because I don’t find my phone to be as much of a distraction as most people. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s very distracting; but it distracts me in a way that computers don’t, and when a notification pops up while I’m typing I’m usually irritated at the interruption rather than thrown off my work. This won’t work for everyone.

Anyway, back to the actual review.)

I’ve stayed very far away from doing formatting work as an editor. As I look at the cost of getting others to do it, though, it’s really obvious that I need to do it myself. So buying a Mac just to use Vellum would break even in about three or four books, plus I’d get a free Mac out of the deal.

But Deckle already does that, and so far the formatting is very nice. It’s aiming to do the same job, plus the job of several other programs. So far I’ve not tested anything by uploading it to KDP, but my on-device testing has been good. I’d be very interested in comments from people who are more used to formatting than I am.

Going Dark

Okay, this isn’t really as much of a draw for everyone as it is for me, but I do not like working in programs that only come in Blinding White Mode. Having a Dark Mode setting is a selling point for me.

Having no less than three Dark Mode settings is just plain luxury. And even the Light Mode settings are more pleasant than what most other programs offer. I don’t know if Scrivener has a Dark Mode setting these days, but every time I looked at it, I heard the sound of Rohan noticing Gondor’s beacons were lit.

I will probably never have a career in front of a camera because I do not like spotlights on me. I certainly don’t like it when I’m trying to write or edit. So I stuck this one at the end because it’s really very personal, but I know there are at least some people out there who like the dark, too.

I’m with The Hobbit'‘s dwarves. Dark for dark business.

A Mobile App is Coming

As I said, I work on my mobile phone, so one of my first questions to the dev was if there would be a mobile app.

The answer was yes, for both iPhone and Android. But it would take time and they don’t have a release date yet. They want the desktop version to be ready and stable before they develop a mobile app to emulate it. That’s reasonable, even if I’m chomping at the bit for a mobile version.

The next time I travel, if it's not out yet, I’m definitely going to bring the laptop. I don't travel often, though, so I really hope that it’ll be out by then.

The Value

Getting Vellum, plus a writing program like Scrivener or others, will be much more expensive than Deckle’s $197, much less the $107 it is for the next few days.

It's also not a subscription, nor is it a revokable license. It’s a lifetime ownership. You own the license; you’re not renting it until the creator blocks your access. All updates will be part of the purchase. The only restriction is the DRM that keeps you from putting it on more than two devices per license.

Nothing’s in “the cloud." The cloud is someone else’s server. I personally recommend that if you do want the data synched somewhere, use Dropbox. Dropbox has the world’s highest award for customer privacy: the CCP has banned its use in China for not giving them a backdoor. But if you only work off one computer at a time, you don’t need to do that at all. (Just please remember to make at least weekly backups on a separate device.)

So if you want to check it out, the website is Deckle.studio. If you just search for Deckle, you’ll get articles about historical paper-making techniques.

And if you want to get that extra 10% off before it goes full price, you can put in the code NINJA at checkout. I’ll get a cut of the money, but I genuinely just want you to have it as cheap as possible. If Thomas comments that he does in fact have his own affiliate code, I’m going to edit this to replace mine with his.