Wrighter

Draft your novel, then rewrite it. It finds the things an editor would mark.

Wrighter is a novel-writing app for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Windows. The same app runs on all of them and one purchase covers every platform.

The drafting comes first. You get a full screen with nothing around the edges, a sprint timer set by minutes or by a word target, a write-forward mode that keeps the text moving in one direction, and a manuscript arranged into chapters and scenes with word counts for each. The write-forward mode is there for people who edit while they type, which I do, and it has cost me years.

Then comes the rewriting, which is where a book actually gets made. Every scene carries a Wrighted score out of 100, and it finds things an editor would mark: clichés, adverbs, passive constructions, echoes, filler, filter words, telling where you meant to show, and sentences that have wandered off from their beginnings. It knows "let out a breath she didn't know she was holding". When you open a manuscript you have not touched in months the scores tell you where to start, and when a scene is done the number will say so before you have reread it nine times looking for reassurance.

It has no opinion on whether your story is any good, and it never will, because that judgement needs a human reader. Wrighter deals with the mechanics and keeps its hands off the story.

Where you disagree, you win. Flag a phrase as deliberate and it stops costing you points permanently, and your overrides build into a style sheet of your own that carries across books.

There is no AI in the app and no call to any AI service. The scoring is a set of written rules worked out on your own device, so the same prose gets the same score every time, and every mark can be traced to a rule you can read.

Nothing you write leaves your device unless you switch sync on, and the licence covers every platform either way. Sync does one job, which is letting your own devices see the same manuscript, and if you leave it off I am not backing your work up, so keep your own copies.

British spelling is handled properly, and American spelling too, whichever you write in. Your book exports to plain Markdown at paying you keep read access andexport permanently.

Seven days free, then £1.99 a month, £19.99 a year, or £49.99 once, and every one of those covers every platform. Wrighter ism by one person, with no staff, noinvestors and no offices, which is most of why it costs £49.99 rather than £150. There are no sales, so there is nothing to wait