A few years ago I discovered yWriter5, a free desktop application designed to make managing the process of novel writing easier. As an aspiring author, I took some time to familiarize myself with the software and began using it on a few personal projects. In many respects yWriter is a powerful tool. It features a wide range of functionality that most authors would find useful. See the official website for a full list of these features.
While I recommend yWriter for anyone interested in writing a novel, one area that I feel the software suffers is in its overwhelmingly complicated interface. Writing can often require an intense amount of focus and sometimes the amount of information displayed in yWriter can be just as distracting as it is useful. Certainly there are times when this information is needed during the writing process. However, I've often wished yWriter would allow me to quickly hide and display this information helping to focus on the task at hand.
Last semester I spent time designing my own solution for aspiring authors called Yarn. Inspired in part by my experience with yWriter, Yarn is still in design. I've included some screenshots in the video below with some of the scenarios and wireframes I've been working on for this project. This is a project that I am seriously considering developing as I believe it would prove to be an extremely useful tool to writers.
