SFD vs Wrighter

Writing apps help with the easy half — outlines, fonts, folders, word-count trophies. The hard half is producing a bad first version of something, and that's all SFD does. SFD is forward-only. You write in a burst, the earlier lines dim and scroll away, and you can't go back to fix them. You can't edit a draft into existence, so SFD won't let you try until it's out. How it works: — A go is a timed burst. You write. You don't reread. — Stall for a few seconds and you get a shove — a nudge that gets blunter the longer you stare at the cursor. — Hit a line you hate? Drop a later and keep moving. Your flags become a punch-list for when you revise. — A finished part is a chunk. A stack of chunks is the Pile — your whole first draft. — When it's done, send it out as plain text, to wherever you actually revise. Drafting is free. Every go, every later, every export — no account, no trial clock, no nagging. THE BIG MONTH is free too: 50,000 words of a novel's first draft between November 1 and 30. SFD shows your words today and how many a day finishes it, lights up a November calendar on every day you write, marks 10,000, 25,000 and 50,000, and gives you a BIG MONTH 2026 stamp and finisher card you can only earn that November. One thing costs money: SFD Habit Tracking, a 99-cent one-time unlock for the habit layer — the streak map and year wall, the month goal, the quiet reminder, stamps, share cards, and the home-screen widget, which carries THE BIG MONTH in November. The scoreboard, not the game. If you bought SFD back when the app itself cost money, the habit layer is yours automatically. What SFD won't do: format, outline, sync, collaborate, or write the draft for you. You write the bad version. A chunk has to get written; inside that, anything goes. Your words stay yours. Every chunk is a plain-text file on your device. No proprietary format, no servers. SFD makes no network calls at all — it can't lose your words and it can't trap them. Get the first draft out. You can make it good later, somewhere with a real keyboard.

Write anything, anywhere. Novels, memoir, non-fiction, theses, screenplays, comics and poetry each with their own layout and tools, on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, Windows or Linux computer, with your book and your research synced across them all. Wrighter takes you from first draft through the self-editing pass where a book gets written, and every scene of prose gets a Wrighter score out of 100 for the things an editor would mark. I have written about 500,000 words over twenty years, and for a long time failed to finish any of them. The apps I used excelled at the first draft yet provided little help at all with what came next. I would open a manuscript, not know where to start, and close it again. Wrighter is what I built when I stopped believing it came down to a discipline problem. Drafting still comes first. Wrighter allows you to write full screen with no other windows to distract you, or with two scenes side by side, against a sprint timer or a word target. Wrighter has a write-forward lock too, because reworking the last paragraph is how a chapter takes four months. Every scene carries a Wrighter score. It finds clichés, adverbs propping up weak verbs, passive voice, the same distinctive word four times on a page, filler, filter words, telling where you meant to show, sentences that run too long, and a good deal more. The score matters less than the exercise of helping you critique your own work: somewhere to start, and a way of knowing a scene is done rather than merely that you are tired of it. Where you disagree with it, you win. Flag a phrase as deliberate and it stops costing you points, and your overrides collect into a style sheet that follows you from book to book. The scoring uses a set of written rules applied on your own machine. Wrighter uses no AI anywhere in the app. Writing a thesis or a paper? Build a reference library by ISBN or DOI, or from a PDF you have open. Cite a source as you type, including page number, and add footnotes the same way. Wrighter checks that every citation matches a source, builds the bibliography in APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard, and keeps the PDFs you quote, with your highlights, a tap away. Switch from Harvard to APA and every citation in the work rewrites itself. Writing fiction or a screenplay? Wrighter can't tell you whether your story is any good, but it helps you make it stronger. Build each character's arc from a classic archetype. Wrighter automatically knows who's in which scene and where the scene takes place. Drive mood, tension and conflict by understanding where your character is in handy pop-up cards. Start the action 'in the middle of things'. Full-book zoomable index card view or outline view help you sequence your work. The dashboard tells you where to pick up the work and what most needs your attention. Take your Research wherever you go: PDFs, web pages and pictures, shared in from any app. Highlight a PDF with the Pencil on the iPad and the marks arrive on your Mac and iPhone too. Bring your work in from .scriv, .fdx, Word and Markdown, and send it out as Word, PDF, ePub or .fdx, or publish it straight to WordPress, Ghost or Micro.blog. Nothing you write leaves your device unless you switch sync on. If you stop paying you keep read access and export permanently. Nobody loses a book because a card expired. One purchase covers Mac, iPhone, iPad, Windows, Linux, and phones and tablets outside Apple's ecosystem, on every tier, with 1 GB of storage for your research and pictures. Seven days free on either subscription, then £1.99 a month, £19.99 a year, or £49.99 once. There are no sales, so there is nothing to wait for. Wrighter is made in the United Kingdom by one person. Many an amazing book never made it past the copy editor's red circles. Wrighter brings the mechanics. You bring the story. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/