Would recommend with caveats
Good for long fiction. But boards take a minute to learn and offline mode needs to be clearer
Actually usable on my phone
still prefer livingwriter on my laptop for longer sessions but good mobile app
better than Docs for novel for sure
After 40k words Docs starts to lag, this app doesnt
Scrivener was too much for me
I bounced off Scrivener twice. LivingWriter felt less like homework. Still has the plotting/elements stuff I needed for a fantasy series
Screenplay convert surprised me
Formatting was solid enough to workshop with a friend. Not replacing Final Draft for a full shoot, but great for testing dialogue
My go to now
Switched from word and never looking back. Being able to drag chapters around and keep all my research in the same place is huge. Customer support got back to me same day when I had a question too
Worth the sub
Was hesitant about paying monthly for a writing app but honestly I've gotten way more done in 3 months than the whole year before. The chapter cards make it easy to see the whole book at once
Great for plotting
I use it mostly for the story boards and character stuff. Manuscript editor is fine too but the plotting is where it shines for me. wish the mobile app had a few more features but overall very happy
An abomination for disabled writers
I am blind and have been using Scrivner for a while, but having to use it with dropbox is sometimes a bit janky so I tried Living Writer. I can use a combo of large type, voiceover and braille display in my work. Most things I can get to work to a large degree in some way. Living Writer is hands-down the most inaccessible app I have ever used in my memory. Its almost as if not only did they not even try and not think about blind users (which is common) but they went out of their way to make it work horribly. Either that or the programmers must be completely incompetent. Voice over does not work in the app AT ALL. Its a no go the second you open the app. All you get is the beep of death. With voiceover not working, that takes out braille displays, switches, and other AT that depends on manuevering with gestures, buttons, eye gaze or third party bluetooth AT devices. But wait! There’s MORE! They also seemed to have turned off dynamic type which allows you to chenge aspects of the font to your own preferences and the app font is teeny. It has a limited workability with zoom magnification, but once you start typing with zoom on, the whole thing crashes. I’ve never seen an app work so terribly on ALL AT fronts. It pretty much gives the impression that these developers hate disabled people and don’t think we might have anything to write about. BTW, janky dropbox saving aside, I’ve never had an accessibility issue with Scrivner. ZERO stars, if possible.
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Good, but needs work
I purchased a subscription and do enjoy using Living Writer a lot for its features—but it has a long way to go and a lot of bug fixes before it is where I would like it.
The Bad: The phone app itself is glitchy and needs some work. While it is useable, the cursor will do some weird stuff, when I click the compose button after not using it for a bit it frequently freezes up and requires me quitting the app or it will move the screen to a completely different part of the passage, instead of popping up every time I type the first letter or two of an element’s name it would be nice if it just automatically turned text that matches an element’s name or alternate name into a link for it, I also would strongly prefer that when I hit the back arrow button when I am on a passage that it goes to the manuscript list of chapters/scenes/passages rather than all the way back to the main menu of manuscripts.
The Good: syncs across app and website (very good, especially when comparable apps like Scrivener don’t allow for this), you can stash blocks of text, ability to make “elements” that you can reference at any point where it is mentioned (i.e. a character’s name)
The Bad: The phone app itself is glitchy and needs some work. While it is useable, the cursor will do some weird stuff, when I click the compose button after not using it for a bit it frequently freezes up and requires me quitting the app or it will move the screen to a completely different part of the passage, instead of popping up every time I type the first letter or two of an element’s name it would be nice if it just automatically turned text that matches an element’s name or alternate name into a link for it, I also would strongly prefer that when I hit the back arrow button when I am on a passage that it goes to the manuscript list of chapters/scenes/passages rather than all the way back to the main menu of manuscripts.
The Good: syncs across app and website (very good, especially when comparable apps like Scrivener don’t allow for this), you can stash blocks of text, ability to make “elements” that you can reference at any point where it is mentioned (i.e. a character’s name)
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Scam
This app is VERY expensive and they don’t tell you their pricing until your free period expires. It’s clumsy too. Find a better app.
Money, money, always money.
This is totally lame. I love this app, but I don’t want to pay every month just to write the story of my dreams (what I want to write about ). I would rather use google docs than a paying/subscription app.
LivingWriter
I love this app. It’s easy to use, all your writing is in one place/app. It does everything I need and more. Works great on iPad, iPhone and Mac.
This is the best writing app I’ve ever used
Not sure where these bad reviews are coming from. Maybe old version? I’ve been using LivingWriter for over a year. On desktop and on mobile and it’s invaluable. I’ve literally switched from using Google docs for random stuff to using this just because of the chapter organization feature they have.
Very Helpful
I love this app! It’s a great tool for writing a novel. The features make it so easy to keep everything organized and I like the feature that lets you know how many pages you’ve written. Best writing app I’ve tried yet! Haven’t had any issues, would definitely recommend!
The best writing app!
I’ve tried a few writing apps over the years and this is by leaps and bounds the rest. I was hesitant on first using this app, I was almost put off by previous reviews until I realised that they were at least a year old. I’m glad I went with my gut feel, and if you purchase the macOS version you have a free trial period, before you have to part with your cash. The support is right-on too 😊
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A lot of bugs
I used LivingWriter for about 6 months. I stopped using it because it crashed and shut down almost every time I used it. After another 6 months went by I was charged for another year, not realizing I was on autopay. The company sent no notification that I was about to be charged. I canceled my subscription asap and contacted the company to see if I could get a refund. They said they’d consider it. I followed up twice and each time they said they were considering it but then never got back to me. Between the bugs and the customer service, I wouldn’t recommend this app.
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Good writing app
I’ve been using this program for a while, it’s got more pros than cons, and is constantly being improved.
There are of course things which can be improved upon but the program is quick to learn, full of useful features and well worth a try.
There are of course things which can be improved upon but the program is quick to learn, full of useful features and well worth a try.
Not user friendly
So I just got this and I’m finding it difficult to use. The YouTube videos made it look so easy. Problems I’ve already run into: I tried to copy a paragraph so I could move it to another section and it just doesn’t copy and paste like any other typed application does. I truly don’t know why something that simple can’t be done. Secondly, I was playing around with fonts because the type was a bit small for me to read. I accidentally made one paragraph bold and I can’t figure out how to turn it back to the same as the others. I followed the YouTube video tutorial! Third, I used AI option to start a manuscript. It showed 1/5 AI usages used, but where did it go?? It’s literally nowhere to be found. It’s also hard to move back from tutorials to work in progress. It’s not intuitive. I’ll keep this for a few days for free trial, but I can’t see paying for this at all. The YouTube videos were so misleading!!
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Lifetime user, constantly having to switch to google docs
I love this app a lot of the time, but the amount of bugs make it too frustrating to use for sustained writing— I now import my docs from Google docs & format them for livingwriter as part of my drafting process when I’m further along. Very frustrating that simple bugs still aren’t fixed & I have def submitted numerous bug reports about this stuff for more than a year. For example, the type of quotation marks it uses on desktop versus the phone app are different, so if you’re editing in one and switch to the other, the “s are different. When editing in the middle of a doc on mobile, the font will randomly change so you have to undo what you’ve written and re-write it— but still sometimes it will change. Yesterday I was trying to edit one sentence and I had to re-do my edit 5 times before it stopped changing the font. It’s also very difficult to highlight the text and change the font, you have to press the button for formatting multiple times and sometimes rehighlight the text too. It can take 10-20 attempts.
The AI chapter-to-screenplay function was great at first but now it just puts your dialogue in the center of the page with your exposition still there.
The most frustrating bug— and increasingly frequent, which is what drove me to leave this review, is that the mobile app is now inconsistently syncing with the desktop app. I write on my phone when I’m not at home, and I write on my laptop when I am. Lately, the phone app almost NEVER updates with what I’ve written on desktop. Even if I restart the app, even if I look through my latest versions— my desktop draft seems to exist only on my desktop. SOMETIMES it will update, it’s not like permanently not syncing, but it’s been enough lately that I can no longer justify using the mobile app.
I love LivingWriter as a concept, I find it has a lot of cool features other apps don’t have & I like the aesthetic and future plans for the app. I use the cover art function a lot & find it gives me better results than most AI (I don’t actually use these images in marketing or publishing, but I like them for my own inspiration purposes). The issues with LivingWriter are more the continued small frustrations that impact user experience yet are not addressed as they implement other ambitious updates. Please get the foundation of you app more solid! I want this app to work as intended, that’s why I became a lifetime user!
The AI chapter-to-screenplay function was great at first but now it just puts your dialogue in the center of the page with your exposition still there.
The most frustrating bug— and increasingly frequent, which is what drove me to leave this review, is that the mobile app is now inconsistently syncing with the desktop app. I write on my phone when I’m not at home, and I write on my laptop when I am. Lately, the phone app almost NEVER updates with what I’ve written on desktop. Even if I restart the app, even if I look through my latest versions— my desktop draft seems to exist only on my desktop. SOMETIMES it will update, it’s not like permanently not syncing, but it’s been enough lately that I can no longer justify using the mobile app.
I love LivingWriter as a concept, I find it has a lot of cool features other apps don’t have & I like the aesthetic and future plans for the app. I use the cover art function a lot & find it gives me better results than most AI (I don’t actually use these images in marketing or publishing, but I like them for my own inspiration purposes). The issues with LivingWriter are more the continued small frustrations that impact user experience yet are not addressed as they implement other ambitious updates. Please get the foundation of you app more solid! I want this app to work as intended, that’s why I became a lifetime user!
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