## "Just write," they said, "It doesn't matter what tool you use..."

Writing is the hard part, everything else is just *formatting*. You could scratch your novel into a wall with a rock, or use a modal command line text editor, the point is: *you should be focusing on writing*. Your tool should be a secondary concern.

## ...says the README file trying to sell me on a writing tool...

Right? I'm losing the sale before the customer even drove the car, but Giterary isn't really selling something (it happens to free, open source software, which bring together [other][git], [powerful][markdown], [freely][php] [available][jquery] [tools][showdown]).

So, what does Giterary do as a writing tool? Giterary is a tool that suggests a better way to work, helps you if it can, concentrating on making the hard things easy, and keeping the simple stuff simple. You can *just write* if you want, but it brings together powerful tools that let you manage complexity down the road.

## "[A first novel won’t be as much work as you think. It will be much more. ][reddit]"

Consider the scale of a novel. For the most part, published writing projects weigh in at around ~50,000 to 100,000 words (and often more). They can take years to write, after which they tend to require extensive editing, re-reads, re-writes, and whatever requisite iterations it takes to make a better product.

Now consider a machine with ~50,000 to 100,000 moving parts. A *novel-machine* that takes a human's attention as input and outputs compelling plot, worthwhile characters, and subtlety. As the engineer/author, it's your job to fabricate the machine parts, construct them correctly, and maybe apply a layer of paint. Sure, it works for you the first time you run it, but when your best friend takes a whirl it seizes midway past the second-stage turbine spooling. You walk slowly through the smoldering wreckage. Your friend is alright. Your pride is not. And you forgot to take notes the first time around.

The point is: if *writing* a novel is hard, *maintaining* a novel is complex. The latter of which is overlooked when *just writing* is a primary concern.

**Giterary offers a set of *nice things* to write and maintain a novel**, managing complexity at both ends of the process, and hopefully without you noticing. How does it do this? Well...

## When programmers are lazy, everyone benefits.

Computer programmers look at your machine with 100,000 moving parts and laugh. Software weighs in at a **tens of thousands to a few million** lines of source code. They don't even bother to count the words.words, were there even words to count.

They laugh because they solved this problemthe management of that complexity a long time ago, in the ages of yore.ago. Lo, and they said, "A*"A hundred people need to work on something with at least a million lines of code."code. And they should all be able to work at the same time, and be able to detect and communicate their changes efficiently, and maintain detailed histories of their changes, and gracefully solve conflicts, should they arise."* And thus it was so, and they've been improving on this concept ever since.

Well, they don't, aside from a vague sense of how thingsIf your novel were when they left. Instead, they write tools to do it for them, to track things, to identify things,like the programmers' source code, you'd be able to keep records, and to compare things. And then they automate it so they can get onmanage your novel with whatever is interesting that day.these all-powerful tools of the programmer gods. The thing is, your novel **is** source code, much like its words are part of your *novel-machine*. It's just a matter of *formatting*.

Programmers have tools to tellGiterary suggests you if files are the same or different, and tellwrite your chapters in Markdown (but you what changes. The same tools can take that difference, and apply it to a similar set of files, anddon't absolutely have the resulting files be updated to reflect the differences. They can take those differences over time and show a *history* ofto). Markdown is a set of files, documenting what changed, how it changed, who changed it, and when. They even added a cute "What was the programmer thinking about?" text box when a programmer makes a change. They even developed a databasetext-based format that lets you keep multiple versions of the same files, and associate them with everything else for when those files were *correct*, and everything plays nicely.do complex formatting by *just writing*. It also extends Markdown's functionality by allowing you to "link" between your documents, similar to Wikipedia.

These simple but powerful tools allow not one, but hundredsGiterary puts these text-based files into a hierarchical directory structure of people with different ideas, styles, work methods,your choosing, and work schedules to work onmanages these files using a singleGit repository. The Git repository stores all version of information.all files, and Giterary wraps around the Git repository to let you easily see information about your files (What changed? Who changed it?)

And they've had## Why do I need this technology for *decades*.information?

## PhilosophyThat's the idea, anyway...

## Technical Bits

[git]: http://git-scm.com/

[php]: http://php.net/

[markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

[jquery]: http://jquery.com

[showdown]: https://github.com/coreyti/showdown

[reddit]: http://www.reddit.com/r/writing/wiki/faq