Motivation is a feeble thing, though it tends to slip away when looking at a blank page and wondering how on earth to fill it. Reaching the goal of 50k words each November by writing two hours a day renewed the desire of my adolescence to bring stories from mind to paper. The realization that I could write a coherent, interesting story (despite my day job as a scientific researcher and university teacher) gave me a huge boost in confidence. The key for me was to dedicate some time and energy every day to this one goal.
DABBLE VS SCRIVENER HOW TO
Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.Īfter some writing adventures as a teenager twenty-something years ago, NaNoWriMo got me back into writing fiction in 2016. Today , writer Christin David shares how Dabble, a NaNoWriMo 2019 sponsor, helped her find her writing community: The company seems responsive and committed for what it's worth, but this is just a risk inherent in going with a smaller company.Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. That means it could go under and your creative output could then be at risk. There's nothing wrong with this, but the company seems to be pretty small.
Google obviously has considerable resources to throw behind any new development, and hordes of developers to make it happen.
Dabble is its own thing, so any enhancements or integrations must be prioritized and coded by the Dabble developers themselves (it's actually hard to tell if there's more than one developer, Dabble may be a one-dev show). Google Docs integrates with the other tools in the Google Docs and Drive suite. You can read the reasoning behind Dabble's subscription model, which makes very good sense to me. There are several Dabble plans priced at $5, $10 and $15, each with correspondingly richer feature sets. But it is something to keep in mind if you're using something free. So if I continue to like Dabble, I'll gladly pay for it. I don't mind paying for a service if I like it, and I shell out a decent chunk of cash each month for Publisher's Marketplace, Autocrit, MasterWriter, and a few other services. Not a big deal, I can just use a browser plug-in or go to a new tab, but a little bit of a drawback.Ĭost. The Dabble editor doesn't allow me to highlight a word and right-click to define the way Google Docs does. I would often look up words in Google Docs when I was researching or-just being honest here-if I wanted to use a word but wasn't sure if it was the right choice. I don't use these tools to prompt me to write, but it is kind of cool to see your various progress counts. Dabble provides some metrics on word counts and allows you to set targets for words per day to keep you disciplined. I'm going to spend some time getting familiar with them soon. If you use hand-written plot grids, this will probably be attractive to you. If I end up using this, I'll write something up about it, but the Dabble folks tout it as a pretty significant feature. Rowling used to plot the Harry Potter books. Plot grids gained some fame as the tool J.K. This looks cool, but since this is just a first look and I was just getting started, I didn't use it much. This is one of the reasons I dislike both Scrivener and Word: they suffer from a glut of options, most of which I'll never use. There also seems to be a specific choice to limit the available tools and options to streamline the workflow for writing. Beyond the actual clean and attractive look of the interface, it's also very straightforward to use. The sidebars reappear with mouse movement without any delay. After using it for a while, this is a surprisingly effective feature and really does keep you focused on your work. It seemed nice initially but I didn't give it much thought. When you're editing or just re-reading your work, Dabble detects idle pointer movement and fades out the side navigation and statics sidebars so you can focus on your work (you can also choose to go into focus mode on-demand). Dabble is pretty sleek and reflects modern web design styling. Scrivener-just on looks alone-looks very dated. The interface is very clean and attractive.