There are quite a lot of different software out there that service writers from world building solutions to actual manuscript writing solutions and even book formatting. I’ve talked about quite a few different writing software here on the blog, including Scrivener–which is a personal favorite of mine–but there’s a lot of other options as well. Today, I’ll be talking in-depth about another writing software tool called Dabble Writer, which was featured in another blog post here on the page before. I’ll be giving you a guide on how it works, what I think about it, and my overall recommendation.
(affiliate disclaimer: some of the links in this post are affiliate links which means that I make a small commission at no additional cost to you when you purchase something through my link)
What is Dabble Writer?
Dabble Writer is an online based writing software that offers solutions for authors and writers with the goal of keeping things simple and minimalistic, eliminating the unnecessary clutter that other software options might include.
The idea of Dabble is to basically make things super easy and not require too much effort to learn in order to get things done. There are a lot of tools within the app that make it much easier to keep things organized and make sense so that when you’re working, you can keep track of everything and it’ll make sense.
Currently, Dabble is best for novel writers, so if you’re someone that is working on a larger novel project, then Dabble is a good option for you. It does support other project types, but it was made with novels in mind.
How to Use Dabble
The first thing is to create an account with Dabble. They offer a 14-day free trial that doesn’t require you to input a card in, which is honestly my favorite kind of trial. I hate when I go to sign up for something and I have to input card information–makes no sense! So, Dabble automatically gets points from me for this.
When you sign up, Dabble will ask you some quick questions about what genre you’re writing in which will help direct you to the template that is already set for your story type. Here are all the template options:
As you can see, there are different options for the different types of stories like fantasy and historical fiction. At the end of the day, you can use the generic blank template, but the others tend to have things built-in and categories that are more relevant to your selected genre.
As a fantasy and sci-fi writer, I picked the fantasy template and this is what it looks like:
The template has quite a lot of options as you can see in the side bar. There are places where you can add chapters, plan out the scenes of your story and the plot, design your character profiles, add notes for world building and more.
It does slightly resemble Scrivener in its UI but it does seem a bit easier to navigate than Scrivener at first glance.
You can select to add new chapters and parts if your story has a lot of parts in it. You can also add images, set the cover art, and more. There isn’t really much you need to do to get started in the writing process itself.
For the sake of experimentation, I decided to use one of my WIPs that I’ve been working on in Scrivener and I’ll be re-doing it in Dabble to see how the experience is for me as a fantasy writer. I personally wrote my original drafts for books like Malware in Google Docs and then Word, but I’ve recently switched to more author-focused software options.
Dabble Features
Dabble includes quite a lot of features for writers aside from just letting you type your manuscript up into its software. Firstly, you have the plotting tool which allows you to see the plot from a sort of birds-eye view.
You fill in the plot by chapter and then create different plotlines, which is a great way to keep track of the main plot and the subplots of your story. It makes the process of organization much easier. I really recommend plotting your story out well before you start writing it because it can save a lot of time. If you want to learn how to do that, check out this post.
The next thing you can do under the plot option is to write out the scenes of what happens in each individual chapter.
Whatever you title your scene, your plot will update with that name:
As you can see, under Chapter 1, I now have the idea of one of the main characters being introduced in the story.
Next, we can add character profiles which is basically just a way to explain who your character is and what role they play in the plot of your overall story. You can add as many characters as you want here:
You can then click on an individual character and add as much information as you want about the character. If you need help figuring out what to include in a character profile, you should check this post out from my blog.
As you add scenes to your chapters, it all updates in the plot section of Dabble as well, so you can add scenes there and add scenes in the chapters section as well.
Writing in the actual manuscript itself is pretty akin to writing in any other software. It’s fast and responsive and the way the chapter pages are set up are already the same as you would have in something like Kindle Create–which I’ve talked about on my blog before.
You can see the goals and stats on the right side of the screen and you can adjust those to fit your personal preferences.
You can also have the software read your text to you, which I think is a great feature that is important when writing a book. Sometimes, reading a sentence in our heads sounds fine but aloud it’s not fine, so having something read it out loud is helpful.
There’s also a really neat thesaurus feature so that you can find alternatives to words to use in your story. It’s really nice to have that feature built into the software because you won’t need to go all the way to Google just to look up synonyms and whatnot for a single word.
You can also export your manuscript to Word, Docs, or something else so that you can place it in whatever self-publishing software you’re using.
For instance, you need a Word doc (or at least a docx file) to input a reflowable eBook into Kindle Create, so you can export it that way.
You can also export it in a manuscript format if you need to send the document to a publisher or agent, which is the format that they’ll want.
The Project Settings allows you to edit details like the authors and the name of the project, which is great for when it goes to actually format everything.
Dabble Pricing
Dabble is not a free program and it does cost money to use. However, there are two pricing models that you can see pictured below:
As you can see, there are three tiers that have different features. So, some of the features in the Premium Version like having the software read aloud to you or getting advanced grammar checks are not available in the basic version. Whichever tier you pick does ultimately depend on your preferences.
Is Dabble Worth the Money?
I would say that Dabble is honestly a really nice tool to use. It’s very simple and makes focusing on writing actually easy. It doesn’t clutter your screen with tons of UI features. Although I consistently use Scrivener, the nice thing about Dabble is that it’s like Scrivener but actually easy to learn without having to watch tutorials on YouTube.
Scrivener is nice, but Dabble does make the writing process itself easier and keeps everything simplistic while pre-formatting things for you in a way that’s easier than other software alternatives.
The biggest downside to Dabble is the monthly payment style. I’m personally not the biggest fan of subscription services for writing books, but for the features it provides, the tiers are reasonably priced.
Overall, I’d say that Dabble is a really cool writing service that makes the writing process easier and streamlines everything in one place while letting you get the disconnected writing features of Scrivener without the complications. I think that if you’re looking for an alternative to Scrivener, Dabble is good.
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