While it seems that software firms want to put AI into everything, many creative people want tools that are AI-free. I’m one of them. I’m not against AI by any means – I use AI tools in music, and I’ve found AI-based transcription to be a godsend (once I take out the bits it makes up) – but as a professional writer and author, generative AI is a no-no for me for multiple reasons.
A big one for me and for many other writers is that genAI writing is based in part on pirating our books: some of my own books and books by my writer friends are in the Anthropic dataset (and because I’m not in the US, I’m not eligible for any of the $1.5 billion settlement that came from the class action lawsuit against the company).
1. LibreOffice (Windows, Mac, Linux)
The free, open source, old-school Microsoft Office alternative isn’t the prettiest app suite out there, I know. But it’s a very good place to write words, because it gets out of your way and lets you focus on the words you’re writing. It has Master Documents so you can break even the biggest writing projects into more manageable chunks, it has the Navigator noting every use of the H1 heading style so you can easily find your way around chapters, and because it runs locally rather than in the cloud it’s always available even when Wi-Fi isn’t.
2. Beat (Mac, iPad)
Created by screenwriter Lauri-Matti Parppei for other screenwriters (and since extended to cover novel writing too), Beat is a clean, straightforward and very fast writing app that features an outliner, distraction-free writing, good file format support, automatic formatting and on the Mac, a library of plugins to expand its features. The Mac version is free and open source; sales from the iOS/iPadOS version help Parppei keep the lights on.
3. Ulysses (Mac, iPhone, iPad)
Ulysses has been my go-to writing app for many years now. It’s a Markdown-based writing environment that runs very quickly and keeps features to a minimum, and I love it so much I wrote an entire article about how good it is. One of its best features is its ability to export your work to almost anything: content management systems, blogging platforms, ebooks and all the key text and document formats. It’s very customizable and has tiny system requirements because working in plain text, which is what Markdown effectively is, isn’t going to make even the most modest Mac break sweat. It’s good on iOS/iPadOS too, and syncs over iCloud.
4. iA Writer (Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad)
Like Ulysses iA Writer is a stripped-down, lightning fast writing environment with superb export options, but while the app doesn’t use AI itself – hence its inclusion here – its creators have taken an interesting approach to the technology, which they’ve written about in detail. Instead of integrating AI writing tools into their apps, they’ve described it as a problem to solve as AI gets everywhere – and their solution is called Authorship. Authorship is in the Mac, iPhone and iPad versions of the app and it can track changes made by the likes of Apple‘s AI writing tools as well as text copied from third party generative AI.
5. Scrivener (Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad)
I’ve written entire books in Scrivener, and that’s what it was made for: in addition to its writing tools it’s also an excellent research and ideas organiser, so you can have notes about your characters, photos of locations you want to use, snippets of information you want to include and anything else relevant to your book right there in the app. It’s overkill if you only want to write short pieces, but if you want an app that can take you from the first blank page to a fully finished manuscript and ebook, Scrivener is superb.
6. Storyist (Mac, iPhone, iPad)
Storyist is a good-looking and very friendly writing app aimed at novelists and screenwriters, and it contains some great tools to help you create your masterpiece including snippets for commonly used text, print-ready PDF output, an excellent outliner and an extensive selection of customisable style sheets for specific kinds of publication. It’s quite similar to Scrivener, albeit a bit less intimidating-looking.
7. yWriter (Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone, iPad)
yWriter promises that it won’t write your novel, suggest plot ideas or perform any creative tasks whatsoever. It’s a stripped-back writing app that encourages you to think of your story in terms of scenes rather than chapters, and to use metadata: project notes, objects used in the scene, which character’s viewpoint is being used, whether the scene is a draft or complete and so on. The Mac app is still in beta and that’s currently closed, but if you have an Apple Silicon Mac you can run the iOS version.
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