Fewer Options, More Writing

When we begin writing, it seems reasonable to want every possible tool at our disposal. Being able to choose the typeface, change the appearance of the page, organise the manuscript in different ways, look things up, add notes, alter the structure or decide how the document will eventually be presented can seem like an advantage. Every new possibility promises to give us a little more control over what we are doing.

The problem is that writing already involves enough decisions.

Every sentence requires us to choose some words and discard others. Every paragraph can continue in several directions, and every character could act differently. A story that is not yet finished contains thousands of possibilities, and writing consists, to a great extent, of gradually giving them up until only the story we have finally decided to tell remains.

Adding more decisions around that process does not always help. We can change the typeface because the page does not quite look right, reorganise notes that were already sufficiently organised or spend some time finding a better way to work. None of these things feels like a distraction because they are all related to the manuscript, but they can also allow us to spend a great deal of time working around a story without actually writing it.

Constraints can have the opposite effect. When some decisions have already been made, they stop demanding our attention. If there are not twenty typefaces to choose from, we do not need to choose one. If the writing space already has a defined size, we do not need to design it. If the tool does not offer a feature for every possibility that occurs to us, we can stop wondering how to use it and continue with the text.

That does not mean writing should be uncomfortable, or that a tool should do few things simply for the sake of doing few things. Features that help us work with a manuscript are useful precisely because they allow the writer to keep moving forward. The difference lies between a possibility that helps us write and one that forces us to make a decision we do not yet need to make.

WordPlanet™ starts from that distinction. It has chapters, notes, projects, backups and the tools needed to accompany a manuscript from its first words to the moment it leaves the program, but it tries to ensure that none of them competes with the writing when it does not need to. You cannot choose from hundreds of typefaces or fill the screen with panels, and you do not need to design the place where you are going to work before you can begin.

Removing those possibilities does not leave an incomplete tool. It leaves a space in which many decisions have already been made so that you can devote yours to the story.

Because a novel is not finished by finding the perfect configuration, the perfect system or the tool capable of doing anything. It is finished by making one decision after another until you reach the final word.

WordPlanet™ removes everything it can decide for you, leaving you with the decisions no one else can make: what to write, what story to tell and when to put down the final full stop.