6 Must-Have Mac Apps for Aspiring Novelists

While you could write an entire novel by just using a simple word processor, with so many helpful apps available out there you’d not only be doing yourself a disservice by not trying them, but you would also be making the writing process much more frustrating than it needs to be.

However, with the myriad of different Mac apps that cater to writers, which ones are the most useful to a beginner novelist? I have used quite a few of these apps myself in my attempt to find the most useful ones for my own writing, so in this article I’ve decided to spare you the headache of trying millions of different apps and have compiled a list of what I believe are the 6 most useful Mac apps for an aspiring novelist.

Scrivener
With its wide range of features and intuitive design, Scrivener is pretty much the go-to writing app for most writers.

With Scrivener you can break down your writing into smaller chunks of text called “Scrivenings” and then sort them and re-arrange them, which can help immensely when trying to figure out the structure of your novel.

Not to mention, Scrivener offers a handy feature that lets you write in full-screen mode with no interface so you don’t get distracted or try to procrastinate as much, which is a common problem among many writers.

Dropbox
If you’re writing a novel then you’re going to have quite a lot of files to keep track of, and you’ll definitely want to back them up so you don’t lose all of your hard work.

With Dropbox you can save all of your work in the “cloud,” which you can access from a variety of different devices, whether it’s a Mac, a PC, an iPhone or a tablet, you never have to worry about not being able to access your work again.

Best of all, if you ever happen to lose your work on any of your devices you can always get it back from the cloud using Dropbox.

Persona
Persona is the perfect app for creating and keeping track of all the various characters in your novel. With Persona you can keep track of every aspect of each of your characters, and even put them into groups to help organize them.

If you’ve ever played Dungeons & Dragons then you’ll feel right at home with Persona, as it uses an interface that is very reminiscent of filling out a character sheet in D&D.; This design makes creating characters very intuitive and helps speed up the creative process.

Folding Text
You can use Folding Text to not only help plan your novel, but you can also use it to set writing goals for yourself and make to-do lists.

Folding Text really shines when you use it to make to-do lists, as you can set timers for each thing on your to-do list, which can come in handy for pacing yourself while you’re writing your novel. Each item in your to-do list also gets its own checkbox so you can check them off as you do them.

Marked
Marked is the app you use after you’re already done writing. With Marked you can preview how your text will look when viewed in a variety of different formats, such as HTML, RTF and much more.

Asides from previewing your work, Marked also shows you your word count and sentence count, but best of all, Marked can also give you readability scores and it can even highlight repeated or unnecessary words.

Marked is definitely a must-have app for proofreading your work.

Evernote
The perfect app for making notes and keeping track of your ideas, Evernote can be used to not only quickly write down notes, but if you prefer to write your notes on paper you can scan them into Evernote and use it to keep track of them.

Evernote also works with Dropbox so you can keep your notes in the cloud.