Word has 15 levels of headings against markdown's 6 though. But you do need manipulation using the outline, and preferably folding, to do that effectively.

Find what works and feels best for you and don’t worry whether or not anyone else agrees with your choice.īrandon Sanderson writes his books using Word, and it seems to work well for him.Ī markdown file is perfectly capable of being a novel, or even a whole series of novels. And Obsidian is a killer PKM and notes app, with incredible depth and power-for free-so it’s worth looking into no matter what.īut that’s me. There are a number of plugins that would make the job easier, including (though I’ve never used it) a longform plugin that tries to duplicate a few of Scrivener’s features. I’ve become a daily user of Obsidian, and if I wanted to write a novel in markdown, I’d use that rather than iA Writer. I do sometimes write rough fragments in iA Writer and import them into Scrivener, though.

Sure, you can write a novel with it, just as you can write a novel in Microsoft Word or any text editor or word processor-or on a typewriter or with a pen. IA Writer is a pretty basic markdown editor, with no special features at all for longform, especially the Mac version, which still lacks folding text and outline navigation. And I prefer rich text over markdown for fiction writing. If you find the interface distracting, you can put it in focus mode and there’s nothing on the screen but your words. Scrivener just makes it so easy to reorganize, split, and combine sections, scenes, and smaller fragments quickly and easily-and also work with it as if it were already one long document whenever you want. I have both, but I’d much rather use Scrivener for longform writing than iA Writer.

Ia writer linux