Best Writing Software For Writers With Anxiety
Ollie Ander
Is probably just a couple cats in a trench-coat—the hair shedding and sunlight napping are highly suspect.
Marketing and releasing a book is the hardest part of the process for all introverted authors—the desire to be perceived but not to be judged, conflicts within us all the time—but that’s not the only stage which can inspire undue worry. Writing can cause anxiety, for a variety of reasons…
Sometimes, just sitting down to write leads to a spiral of questions that are neither helpful nor productive: Is my writing good enough? Am I writing enough? Anxiety can pop up at the most inconvenient times. I’ve found that having an app to mitigate self-doubts is an actionable solution against being an anxious writer, so here’s all the tools $ NovelPad$ has to help you get words down, confidently, and with as little stress as possible.
Productivity
Am I writing enough?
When you don’t feel like you’re making the progress you wanted to on a manuscript, sometimes it’s hard to even call yourself a writer. Discourse online doesn’t help with imposter syndrome either. No one can agree on what makes someone a "proper" author: daily wordcount, routine, publications, fans/followers, the nebulous concept of mastery? It’s difficult not to get caught up in overthinking those arbitrary standards when you feel like you have little to show for your effort.
Writing is a very lonely hobby that only pays off after hundreds of hours of input. How do you quantify that and stay motivated along the way?
Novelpad has a $ Goals feature$ to visually show your progress, validate your efforts, and keep you on track to complete your manuscript—so you can get that big emotional payoff we all dream of!
Set a goal that works for you. Pick a wordcount deadline and NovelPad will provide a graph showing how far you’ve come and what you’ve got left to write.
You can always change the parameters later. NovelPad wants to motivate you, not stress you out! The Goals feature is customizable. You can fluctuate your workload based on different days of the week to suit your schedule—you can even block out time for a vacation. Likewise, if you’ve got a chunk of time to commit to writing, you can schedule sprints!
You can keep it as a standardized daily wordcount goal or pick "adaptive" so the goal will fluctuate to accurately reflect when you’ve done more or less in a day than originally intended. Having an adaptive schedule gives you the satisfaction of chipping away at your end goal, watching the daily requirements go down as your word count goes up!
Distraction
Am I missing something? Should I look that up?
Distraction is not directly connected to anxiety, but getting distracted enough can cause it. Have you ever sat down to write, looked over at the clock, seen that hours have passed, and yet, nothing’s been written down? It’s so disorienting! What have I been doing all this time? Distraction is a plight of anyone constructing a complex world, but especially to those with ADHD, and it’s all too easy to incur poor moodlets as consequence of the distraction bug.
Not only is Novelpad’s writing layout clean and clutter-free to reduce negative stimuli, there’s a $ Notes feature$ to help keep you on-task. Not sure about something, worried about accuracy or proper wording? Put a note on it, come back later, don’t break your stride for errant questions.
Disorganization
There’s so much to keep track of, where do I even start?!
I personally get most anxious at the prospect of undertaking large writing projects. When I take on a story without a gameplan, I get overwhelmed and give up. If I’m looking for something—a resource or image I stowed away for later—and can’t find it, I get defeated.
Novelpad is so helpful when it comes to getting overwhelmed because it has tabs for each thing you can (and should) be keeping track of: Chapters, Plots, Characters, Locations—they all have their own separate tab to organise your thoughts and resources. It’s easy to look up something in your manuscript, tag, or $ colour code$ , so you can quickly scrub through your writing for its appearance; look at the bigger picture without all the clutter. There’s nothing that cures my anxiety quite as easily as finding what I’m looking for as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
Anxiety Over Lost Work
What if I lose all my writing—AGAIN?
Have you ever lost your manuscript, either by a computer error, or simply by not knowing which of the many iterations of draft names was actually the Work in Progress.doc? NovelPad has you covered with an app that can be used online or offline (so there’s no lost progress from connection error).
Novelpad also keeps draft versions for you! Did you spend all day rewriting a chapter just to realize it was better before? You can go back and $ revise older writing too$ , so there’s nothing lost to an older, obsolete document app without the memory to keep up. Rest assured, with NovelPad you should never lose your drafts again—you can lay that anxiety to rest.
Rusty Return
Where was I again?
Have you ever come back to a writing project after a long break and forgotten where you were? Getting re-oriented can be stressful, but NovelPad makes $ navigating your manuscript easy$ to jump back to where you left off. The Scene Cards in Chapters and the Plot Tab are useful for refreshing yourself on where you were going with the story. These features, including $ the Insight Board$ , are also good for affirming whether you’re $ hitting plot beats on-time$ , and whether there’s any unnecessary fluff (like a scene that could get cut).
Writing can cause all types of anxiety, but $ Novelpad$ is designed to help combat as many as it can—and it’s improving all the time! If you join the $ Novelpad Discord server$ , there’s a tab to offer suggestions to the developer. They’d love to hear your ideas and make the experience of writing as anxiety free as possible. $ Follow this link$ to join the Novelpad server and contribute to making it the best writing app, for all types of writers!
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