“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, powerful, freely available tools).
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. ”
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, were there even words to count.
They laugh because they solved the management of that complexity a long time ago. Lo, and they said, “A hundred people need to work on something with at least a million lines of 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.
If your novel were like the programmers’ source code, you’d be able to manage your novel with 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.
So what does it do?
Giterary suggests you write your chapters in Markdown (but you don’t absolutely have to). Markdown is a text-based format that lets you do complex formatting by just writing. It also extends Markdown’s functionality by allowing textual annotations, and also allowing you to “link” between your files, similar to Wikipedia, letting you build a web of references to information you need.
Giterary puts these text-based files into a hierarchical directory structure of your choosing, and manages these files using a Git repository. The Git repository stores all versions of all files, and Giterary wraps around the Git repository to let you easily see information about your files, down to showing you when you swapped out “she said” with “she said, languorously.”
The killer features, though, is Git’s ability to act as a distributed database. TODO
(It can also do things like show you dictionary word counts, auto-generating tables of contents, etc., and other common word processing features, but those are pretty run-of-the-mill, so you can discover those for yourself.)
Why would I need this information? Nobody has time for that noise.
Two reasons:
You will forget about something, or, forget why you did something.
I barely remember last week. Yesterday’s still fuzzy.It may not only ever be you making the changeschanges.
You never thought about **that, did you, hot shot? Well, yeah, I guess maybe you did. Multiple authors isn’t unheard of, but probably not the common case. But the most common case: you will eventually need to turn your things over to an editor. You can submit a massive, monolithic Word document via email and hope Track Changes does the job. But what do you do while you’re waiting for them to send your document back?
It my seem like information overload, but you can ignore it until you absolutely need it.
Why would I need to organize my information this way?
IfIf everything is a text file, there are no surprises.surprises.
Text is text is text. Files are files are files.YouYou maybe should be doing it anyway…anyway…
Just saying. The reason for not dividing your novel out into different files is because eventually you’ll have to stitch them back together…