: I suspect people will object to me saying this, but still, wanted to give some food for thought: Why not just keep plain text files, or documents made in whatever word processor you prefer?

@Frith254

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I suspect people will object to me saying this, but still, wanted to give some food for thought:

Why not just keep plain text files, or documents made in whatever word processor you prefer?

I'm 32, and I've been writing on a computer since I was 18, so I have about 14 years of character and worldbuilding documents built up, for several different universes.

The trouble with deciding to put your character or world information in some flavor of software-of-the-month is that it tends to store data in a custom database or flat file schema. As you write more and more, and years pass, you are putting yourself in a position where, if the data format the software you use isn't easily transferable to a newer program, you can abruptly find yourself in a position where your old data is difficult to access because your operating system changed, doesn't support your old program, and nobody bothered to program an easy data migration path for YOUR software to whatever the new thing ends up being, because it was so niche.

You'll be more insulated against this sort of issue if you decide on a naming scheme and just keep text files, or word processor files, on your hard drive or cloud drive in some sort of order. Since word processors in general are so widely used, you KNOW there'll always be a way to convert text files or word processor documents to another format, and it probably won't be all that painful. But if you start using really custom software, you might be in a frustrating position later with your worldbuilding and characer data.

Or...you might not--maybe you're technical and you don't mind doing data migrations. I'm technical and not afraid of software and honestly I still think they're a PITA and time-consuming. I'd rather spend my time writing than sorting out my data and putting it into a new format.

I just wanted to give some food for thought before you or anyone tries to pick software thinking it'll work wonders for the writing process.

Writing really comes down to words on a page...fancy databases are often good timewasters but can distract you from actually writing, and in the long term can make your old data difficult to access if you want it later.

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