Looking for an editor for your story? Notepad, Word and Google Docs are too simple. Scrivener, Manuskript and yWriter are too complex. You like Word-style editors for writing stories, but once the manuscript grows large it becomes difficult to restructure. You may have tried Scrivener-style tools, but dislike how much setup they require before you can even begin writing, and editing scene-by-scene feels restrictive when you just want to add things here and there.
How about trying MaweJS?
Writers can roughly be divided into two types: pantsers and planners. Pantsers start writing the story and let the flow take them wherever it goes. Planners (sometimes called plotters) first make plans and outlines before they start writing.
Pantsers are usually fine with tools like Notepad or Word. Planners are catered to by dedicated writing tools such as Scrivener and its counterparts like Manuskript and yWriter.
But there is a third category: plantsers. These writers fall somewhere between pantsers and planners, and I happen to be one of them. I start writing like a pantser, but at some point I begin to plan, reorganize, and restructure the story like a planner.
Sadly, neither Notepad nor Scrivener supports plantsers particularly well. That is why I needed a tool for myself, and why I wrote Mawe. MaweJS is a story editor for plantsers: writers who start writing first and structure their story later.
MaweJS follows a simple principle: write first, structure later. It focuses on structuring existing text rather than planning it beforehand. It is the kind of tool you reach for when you already have a large manuscript — perhaps 100,000 words — and you are no longer sure how to shape it into a finished novel. Instead of imposing a predefined outline, MaweJS helps writers analyze, reorganize, and understand the structure of the text they have already written.
At the same time, it remains a true just start writing tool: you can begin with nothing but text, and only use the structural tools if and when you need them. If you do not need them, you can simply keep writing.
MaweJS is not meant to replace planning tools like Scrivener. MaweJS is what you use when Word stops working. When your manuscript grows too large to manage with copy-paste and scrolling, you can simply move your text from Word into MaweJS and continue working on it there.
MaweJS is actively used for writing fiction and has already been used to write hundreds of stories in various lenghts. MaweJS is the latest editor in a series of writing tools developed and used for real fiction writing since the mid-2000s.
Examples of stories written with MaweJS:
- My Archive of Our Own account: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaKo71/works
- A collection of other works written with MaweJS: #236
Want to give a try? If so, read my Wiki page about the subject:
https://github.com/mkoskim/mawejs/wiki/Thinking-about-trying-MaweJS%3F
Major change: Material UI as an UI library was replaced by Base-UI. See the discussion about the change:
AppImage: In newer Ubuntus you may encounter errors due to changed permissions. You may need to run AppImage without sandboxing:
$ mawejs-x.y.z.AppImage --no-sandbox
In short, MaweJS is an externally unstructured editor (like Notepad, Word or Googledocs), and internally a structured editor (like yWriter, Scrivener and Manuscript). MaweJS is a story editor that feels like Word, but works like Scrivener underneath.
When you create a new file, you can just start writing your story, just like opening Notepad or Word. There is absolutely no setup required — just start writing.
Cutting text to pieces: The most powerful feature in MaweJS is, that it is internally a structured editor just like Manuskript, yWriter or Scrivener. When your text mass grows, you can start splitting your text to scenes, and gather scenes together to groups. Splitting text to scenes and groups works just like applying headers in editors like Word or LibreOffice:
Moving stuff around: Splitting your text to scenes allows you to move them around with drag-and-drop. Putting them in the same group allows you to move a bunch of related scenes at once. There are two "sections": your draft and notes. I am pretty sure that if you don't want to use anything else, you will love drag'n'droppable story index! It can really make your life much easier.
Folding: Furthermore, a very powerful tool for writing is folding, you can hide parts of your text when working with other parts:
Folding makes the editor to resemble a bit more conventional structured editor, where you have one scene visible for editing at time. In this case, you can choose which scenes are visible when you write your story.
Commenting: You can make comments for you, that will not get exported to manuscript. So, you can keep your comments within the story as long as you like.
Missing text, fillers & target counts: You can write descriptions of story pieces still missing. So, you don't have to complete a scene at once, but you can leave there a mark, and come back to those issues later. You can also give scenes, chapters and acts target word counts, and see how much you are still missing.
Story structure: You can view a pie diagram of your story, and compare it to selected template:
There is currently K. M. Weiland's story structure templates and Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet, but we may add more later. It wouldn't be bad, that you could have a collection of different templates for various purposes (thrillers, romances, etc).
Live screenshot while editing one of my stories (written in Finnish):
At topmost, there is the selection of view. Below that is a toolbar to change settings in the editor. The main editing view contains three parts: (1) index of the draft, (2) editor display, and (3) index of notes.
If you like to see the result, the story in the screenshot is available online (in Finnish):
https://jumalhamara.wordpress.com/gjerta-avaruudessa/
https://archiveofourown.org/works/76325336/chapters/199756276
I have also made an English translation from the story:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/76329611/chapters/199767531
You need two tools, git and npm. Check you have them:
$ git -v
$ npm -v
Install the needed tools, if you don't have them already. On Linux you can do that from command line, on Windows you can get the installation packages from web.
Windows: It is probably easier to use Git bash shell as the npm commands are bash commands.
Clone the repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/mkoskim/mawejs.git
$ cd mawejs
mawejs$
Note: If you want to contribute, you need to make a fork.
Get dependencies:
mawejs$ npm i
Run application from sources:
mawejs$ npm run dev
Ubuntu: In newer Ubuntus, if you run the sources, you may need to set Chrome SUID bit on. You need to do this every time ElectronJS is updated. There is now npm run target to do that:
mawejs$ npm run fix
It uses sudo, so it will ask your password. If you don't trust my target, you can do it manually, too:
mawejs$ sudo chown root node_modules/electron/dist/chrome-sandbox
mawejs$ sudo chmod 4755 node_modules/electron/dist/chrome-sandbox
Building:
mawejs$ npm run build
Building produces platform-specific result file (AppImage for Linux). Remember to use --no-sandbox to run the AppImage in newer Ubuntus:
mawejs$ dist/mawejs-x.y.z.AppImage --no-sandbox
Windows: At the moment, there are some problems with Windows builds: #404
If you update the project with 'git pull', you may need to update the libraries, too:
mawejs$ git pull
mawejs$ npm i
Ubuntu: Remember to reapply SUID bit, if Electron package was updated.
VS Code Electron debugging: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-recipes/tree/master/Electron
React DevTools are installed by default (by electron-devtools-installer), but you need to reload the window before they are attached to devtools, see:
electron/electron#41613 (comment)
You can test MaweJS with example files located in examples/
https://github.com/mkoskim/mawejs/tree/master/examples
There are few articles in the Discussions tab which you might be interested:
Read more about MaweJS from Wiki pages:
https://github.com/mkoskim/mawejs/wiki
Or check out discussion board:
https://github.com/mkoskim/mawejs/discussions
Copyright (c) 2021 Markus Koskimies
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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