Reverie

Reverie Writing Has No Sync. How Will Your Novel Sync on iPad and iPhone?

2026-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

Reverie is coming to iPad and iPhone, and it still won’t have sync. Your novel is safer for it.

I’m bringing Reverie</a> to iPad and iPhone, and I hope to have it out before November. The same warm page and the same manuscript, chapters and scenes and all, on the device in your bag. And whenever I tell someone that, the same question comes back: how does the novel you drafted on the Mac turn up on the iPad, when Reverie has no sync? There’s no Reverie cloud and no account to sign into.
It’s already there. Your manuscript never lived inside Reverie to begin with.
Where your novel actually lives</h2>
A Reverie manuscript is a folder of ordinary files, usually one per chapter. You can see them in the Finder or in File Explorer, open them in any app you like, and back them up by copying them, the same as your photos. Reverie reads them and writes them. It doesn’t own them, any more than your camera owns your pictures.
Most writing apps work the other way round. They keep your book inside their own private filing system, and once your words live in a private format, moving them between devices becomes the app’s problem to solve. So the app builds its own sync service, and now there’s an account to manage and a copy of your novel sitting on someone else’s servers. It’s invisible while it works. When it breaks, it breaks somewhere you can’t see or reach, and every writers’ group has heard the story of the project that wouldn’t open afterwards.
Reverie skips the problem instead of solving it. Ordinary files in an ordinary folder can be carried by machinery you already own. iCloud Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive have spent years learning to move files between devices, and they are very good at it. Your novel doesn’t need special treatment, only to be the kind of thing they already know how to carry.
The setup, such as it is</h2>
Keep your manuscript folder somewhere that syncs. On a Mac that usually means iCloud Drive: a folder there is on every Mac you sign into, without you doing anything further. On Windows the same job is done by OneDrive or Dropbox. If you have any of these, and nearly everyone does, your novel now travels with the storage you already had.
That’s the whole setup. Reverie doesn’t need to know it’s happening, and your writing never passes through me. There’s no account to create and no monthly fee keeping the connection alive.
When the iPad and iPhone app arrives, this same folder is the setup for that too. You’ll open Reverie, point it at your manuscript in the Files app, and write. Finish a scene on the train and it’s on your Mac when you get home.
The honest part</h2>
Two devices and one chapter means it’s possible, once in a while, to edit the same file in two places before they’ve had a chance to talk to each other. Write on the iPad in a café with no wifi, then come home and change the same chapter on the Mac before the iPad gets back online, and the two copies will disagree.
When that happens, Reverie throws neither version away: it sets the second version down beside the original as a conflicted copy. What you find in your folder is two readable versions of the chapter, side by side, in plain text. You open both, keep what you want, and delete the other. Annoying, certainly. But compare it with what a conflict does inside a private format, where the disagreement lands in machinery you can’t open. With plain files, the worst case is reading.
In practice you’ll rarely see it. When your devices are online, a saved chapter settles across them in seconds, and the window where both copies change while separated is a narrow one. It exists, though, and I’d rather you heard it from me than met it as a surprise.
What this costs</h2>
This approach gives up some things, and you should know what they are before you trust a book to it. There’s no live collaboration: two people can’t type into the same chapter at once, and Reverie will never be the right tool for co-writing a draft in real time. There’s no clever merging when two edits collide; you get the two copies and you choose. And sync arrives at whatever speed your provider carries it, which is usually seconds and occasionally isn’t.
What you get in return is a novel that belongs to you in the plainest sense. Files you can open in twenty years, in anything, with no subscription standing between you and your own words. And nothing for me to lose or leak, because I never have your writing in the first place. When the iPad app lands, it picks up your manuscript exactly where the Mac left off, without either of them ever having heard of a Reverie account.
A novel is years of your life. It deserves to live somewhere plainer than the inside of an app. Reverie keeps it in a drawer you own, and iPad and iPhone simply get their own key. The folder you set up today is all the preparation they’ll need.
Mark

Reverie vs Word and Google Docs, from the Maker of Reverie

2026-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Word and Google Docs will hold a novel. I’ve never felt either was built to make you want to write one.

You didn’t choose either of them. They were already there. Word is the program every document on your computer already opens in. Google Docs is a tab you already had open. So the book starts wherever you happen to be, in a new blank file, and for the first few thousand words that’s fine.
And then the page feels like nothing. It’s the same flat white surface you’d use for a tax return, and it treats the most personal thing you’ll ever make exactly like a memo. Nothing about the room tells you a novel is being written in it. Once that’s pointed out you stop being able to unsee it, and over a few hundred hours alone with a manuscript the emptiness wears on you.
I make Reverie, so you know where I’m standing. But I wrote fiction in both of these for years before I built anything, and most of what follows is just what they do to a novel once it gets long.
What both of them get wrong</h2>
Start with the feel, because it’s the part nobody names. Word and Google Docs are competent and inert. The cursor blinks the way it has blinked since the eighties, and the page looks identical whether the words are pouring out or you’ve been stuck on one sentence for forty minutes. It never answers you, so it never puts you anywhere. You’re left to find the writing in yourself, against a surface that doesn’t care whether you write or not.
Under that sits a structural problem. A word processor thinks your book is one long document, and that single idea causes most of the practical pain. Ninety thousand words becomes a scroll with no shape you can hold. Moving chapter eleven ahead of chapter nine means cutting it out and hunting down the place to drop it, hoping you didn’t strand a scene on the way. The shape of the book stays in your head and never reaches the screen, and the further you get the more of your attention goes to not losing your place.
Then there’s everything around the page, and none of it is for you. The toolbar holds a hundred controls a novelist never touches. A spell-check underline argues with your invented place name. A notification slides in. Then a comment in the margin, the waiting tabs, the rest of the application asking to be noticed. A novel gets written in the stretches where you forget the software is there, and neither of these was built to be forgotten.
And both are now adding the thing I most wanted kept out of the room. It isn’t only the offer to write your next sentence. It’s the suggestions and corrections that nudge a line toward what the machine would have written, and if you lean on them the voice that reaches the page stops being quite yours. It becomes yours blended with everything the model was trained on. Word has Copilot, Google Docs has Gemini, and you can switch them off.
Where they genuinely differ</h2>
Two honest differences. Google Docs is free, and for getting a draft in front of another person nothing beats it. The price is that the manuscript isn’t really yours: it sits on Google’s servers, you write inside a browser tab alongside everything else you have open, and the book lives somewhere you can’t quite put your hands on. Word is the format the industry runs on. Agents and publishers want a Word file, and its editing tools have had thirty years of sharpening. If a lot of your week is that kind of work, it earns its keep.
What Reverie does instead</h2>
Reverie is built the other way round, for the writing rather than the document.
It builds the structure as you write. A scene break is three asterisks on a line, the mark manuscripts have used for a century, and a single keystroke turns the scenes you’ve already written into an outline you can see, each one labelled by its first line. When chapter eleven needs to move, you drag it, and the words go with it, the whole passage lifted out and set down with the joins handled. Restructuring a novel takes seconds, not an afternoon.
Then the part a list can’t hold, which is how it feels. I spent twenty-five years making games, where the whole job is making a screen answer a person’s hands, and Reverie’s page is built with that same craft. It’s warm rather than clinical, and it responds to the act of writing, so that sitting down to it puts you in the frame to write instead of leaving you to find that frame yourself. That feeling is the reason the app exists, because what finishes a book is looking forward to the page.
There’s no AI in it, and there never will be. The whole point is that the voice on the page stays yours. It holds a whole novel and stays quick with it, the same on page six hundred as on page two. There’s almost nothing to format and little on the screen but your words, so there’s not much to do except write the next one.
Your manuscript stays on your machine, in plain files you own and can open in anything. When the book is ready to leave the room, Reverie exports it as a submission-ready manuscript in Shunn format, the layout agents and publishers expect, or as a Word file or a PDF.
None of this survives being described, which is the trouble with writing about feel at all. So I’ll stop trying. The trial is free for fifteen days, long enough to tell the difference between a page that tolerates a novel and one that wants the book out of you. Open it, type three asterisks and a line about the scene you’ve been carrying all day, and let the page make its own case.
Mark

I Spent 25 Years Making Games. Then I Made a Writing App.

2026-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Games taught me that how a thing feels is what people enjoy. This is what happened when I pointed that lesson at the writing page.

I’ve spent twenty-five years making video games. Lead programmer at Acclaim in the PlayStation 2 days, senior technical director at Midway, and in 2010 I co-founded Neon Play, where one of our games became Apple’s ten billionth App Store download and the studio earned a Queen’s Award for Innovation before Hachette bought it. Games taught me one lesson above all the others: how a thing feels is what people enjoy. So when I went back to writing science fiction and found that every writing app felt bland and boring, I did the only thing a game maker knows how to do about that. I built the page I wanted to sit at, with the same tools we use to make games feel alive, and with none of the AI everyone else was busy bolting on.
What games teach you about feel</h2>
There’s a discipline in game development that doesn’t really have a name outside the industry. Some people call it game feel, some call it juice. It’s the craft of making a button press feel like something. A jump in a platformer is just a number changing, but tune the arc right and stretch the character a little at the top, give the landing a puff of dust, and the jump feels good. No player ever says “lovely animation curves on that jump”. They say the game feels great, and they keep playing.
The strange thing about feel is that it’s invisible by definition. Players never point at it. When it’s missing they don’t complain either; they just drift away and couldn’t tell you why. So studios spend real money, whole chunks of the schedule, on things no one will ever consciously see. We spent it anyway, every time, because it decides whether people come back. At Neon Play we made games for millions of players, and the difference between a game that held them and a game that didn’t was almost never the feature list.
That lesson goes deep enough that you stop being able to switch it off. You feel a stiff button in a lift panel, or a website animation arriving a frame late. And eventually you notice that the software you do your most personal work in has no feel at all.
The page that never blinked back</h2>
I’ve written science fiction on and off for twenty years, evenings and weekends around the day job. In all that time the tools barely changed. Every writing app handed me the same thing: a flat white rectangle and a cursor blinking the way it has blinked since 1984. The page didn’t know I was there. It looked the same when the words were pouring out as it did when I’d been stuck on one sentence for forty minutes. Nothing about it responded to anything I did.
At some point the game maker in me put a name to the problem. Writing software has no feel discipline. The category competes on features, or lately on minimalism, which mostly means removing features and leaving the same inert page behind. Nobody owns the moment of putting words down. In games, that moment, the live loop between a person’s hands and the screen, is the entire job. There are rooms full of people tuning it. And here was a category where someone sits alone with the hardest creative work of their life for hundreds of hours, and that moment was nobody’s job at all.
Game tech, aimed at a quiet page</h2>
So Reverie’s editor is built the way we build games. The page is rendered on the GPU, with shaders, and the light is real HDR rather than a flat image pretending. It’s the same machinery studios point at muzzle flashes and explosions, pointed instead at something much quieter. The cursor carries a soft glow. The page warms, very gradually, as you get into the flow and the words start to come. Formatting eases into place rather than snapping. Most of it is tuned to sit just under conscious attention, because that’s where feel lives.
Some of the detail goes further than anyone will consciously register. When the cursor brightens, the edges of the letters nearest it are lit by that same light. You won’t notice it unless you go looking for it. But it’s there, and it makes the words feel a little more real.
In a game you can reward attention with spectacle. On a page, spectacle is the enemy, because attention belongs to the sentence. I didn’t find that line by trial and error. Before building any of it I’d been deep in the research on flow, the work I wrote up in The Neuroscience of the Page</a>, and it says the state is fragile: the wrong visual event at the wrong moment wakes the inner critic and ends the session. So the rule was set before the first shader was written. The page only earns a little theatre where flow isn’t. That happens at exactly two moments. When you set a heading you’re starting something new, not yet in the groove, so the page can afford some flourish. And when you type a scene break you’ve just finished a scene, which is a thing worth celebrating. Everywhere in between, the page stays quiet and does its work underneath you.
I’m aware this is the opposite of where the industry went. These last few years the engineering budget went into AI, into software that writes for you, and writing apps grew chat panels the way they once grew toolbars. Reverie has no AI in it at all</a>. I want the machine doing what machines are good at, making the room better and the page worth sitting at. The words are the human’s job. That split is the whole design.
What it adds up to</h2>
Reverie is a novel writing app for Mac and Windows. It holds a whole manuscript across chapters and scenes and exports it in the format publishers expect. Your work stays in plain Markdown files on your own disk, or in a cloud folder you sync yourself, since they’re just files. One purchase, no subscription. And underneath all of that, the real point: a page built by people who spent their careers making screens feel alive, on the bet that the same craft that makes a game come alive under your hands can keep a writer’s words flowing.
Twenty-five years of game feel, aimed at the quietest surface there is. The trial is free for fifteen days</a>, and the page will make its own argument better than I can.
Mark

Reverie vs Scrivener, from the Maker of Reverie

2026-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

Why Reverie instead of Scrivener? I’d ask a different question.

People keep asking me why they should choose Reverie over Scrivener. I understand why the question arrives in that shape, and I should say up front that I make Reverie, so I have a side. But I think it’s the wrong question. The right one is smaller and more useful: which of them is right for you? Not for writers in general, not in some feature-by-feature scoring. For you, and the way you actually work.
So that’s the comparison I’m going to write. It starts with a concession.
Where Scrivener simply wins</h2>
Scrivener</a> is $59.99/£59.99/€69.99, paid once, and for a certain kind of project it has no equal. The binder holds everything: the manuscript, the character notes, and the research beside them, PDFs and images and saved web pages all in the same window as the draft. Compile, its export system, can produce more or less any format a publisher, university or self-publishing platform has ever asked for, once you’ve made friends with it.
If you’re writing a PhD thesis, a biography with two hundred sources, technical documentation, or any structure-heavy non-fiction where the research has to live next to the text, buy Scrivener. I mean that without a wink. That’s the project it was built for, and Reverie isn’t trying to be that tool.
And on the question everyone asks now: Scrivener contains no AI. Literature & Latte have said so in plain language, no artificial intelligence and no data scraping, and their public writing on the subject has been thoughtful rather than opportunistic. No subscription either. In an industry sprinting towards monthly fees and bolted-on AI, they’ve held the line on both, and I respect them for it.
The two ends of the spectrum</h2>
At the other end of things sits the discovery writer, and this one I know from the inside. No outline, no folders, no synopsis cards, because there’s nothing to put on a card yet. The story turns up on the page or it doesn’t turn up at all. I’m this writer, and this is where Scrivener and I parted ways. I’d open it, see the empty binder waiting to be organised, and feel the session end before it started. The structure I was being asked to build didn’t exist yet. Writing was how I was going to find out what it was.
Reverie was built for this writer. You open it and there’s a page. You write. The structure magically comes later, read out of the draft you made, and I’ll get to how in a moment.
But most novelists don’t live at either end. You outline, a bit. A page of notes, a list of scenes, a shape held loosely in your head. You’re not building a research database, and you’re not flying entirely blind either. If that’s you, the choice is genuinely open, and it comes down to a question I don’t think gets asked enough.
Where should your outline live?</h2>
First, the mechanical difference. In Scrivener, a scene is a document. You create it in the binder, give it a title, perhaps fill in its synopsis card, and your manuscript is the sum of its documents. When your plan is a real object, something you shuffle and colour-code and stand back from on the corkboard, this is exactly right.
In Reverie, a scene is a mark you type. Three asterisks on their own line, the same scene break manuscripts have carried for a century, and you keep writing.
That small difference decides a lot about outlining. Say you know the next four scenes. In Scrivener, sketching them means making things: a new document for each, a title, perhaps a synopsis, then back out to the corkboard to see the shape. None of those steps is hard. But each one is a small trip away from the prose, a bit of interface between you and the next thought.
In Reverie the same sketch is typing. Three asterisks, a line about the first scene. Three asterisks, a line about the second. Ten seconds each, hands never leaving the keys. A keystroke opens the sidebar and there’s your skeleton: the scenes you’ve written and the ones you’ve promised yourself, each labelled with its first line. The list moves things, too. Drag a scene to a new position and the words actually move, the whole passage lifted out and set down where you dropped it, the joins handled. As you reach each note you write the scene under it and delete the note. The plan dissolves into the book.
So the question isn’t how much you outline. It’s what your outline needs to be. If it needs to be cards on a corkboard, an artefact you manage, Scrivener does that brilliantly and Reverie doesn’t do it at all. If it’s really a list of what happens next, then typing it straight into the draft is quicker than any planning interface, precisely because there isn’t one. For a lot of outlining, the UI was never the help it looked like. It was just in the way.
Only you know which side of that line your outlining falls on. I’d honestly suggest finding out by trying it: take the book you’re working on and sketch its next few scenes the Reverie way. It costs a minute.
The other reason to try it</h2>
Everything above is about structure, and structure is maybe a tenth of a writing life. The other nine tenths is the part nobody puts in comparison tables: actually sitting down and staying in the work.
This is really why Reverie exists. The page is warm rather than clinical, and it responds to the act of writing, quietly, in ways designed to keep you in the flow rather than pull you out to admire the software. Scrivener’s editor, when I used it, was fine. I built Reverie because I didn’t want fine. I wanted a page I’d look forward to, because looking forward to the page is what gets a book finished.
You can’t evaluate that from a blog post, mine or anyone’s. The trial is free for fifteen days, which is long enough to know.
What Reverie doesn’t do</h2>
Reverie doesn’t do research binders, corkboards, synopsis cards or character sheets. There’s no built-in sync either, and that’s a choice: your work lives in plain Markdown files you can open in anything, or keep in the Dropbox or iCloud folder you already use so it follows you between devices. Reverie holds a whole novel across chapters and scenes, lets you reorder any of them with a drag, and at the end exports a submission-ready manuscript in the standard format, or Word, or PDF. If the missing pieces are the ones your project needs, you already have your answer, and it’s Scrivener.
Both apps are a single purchase. Neither has a subscription. Neither has AI. The values are unusually close for two products in the same category, which is why the deciding vote belongs to you rather than to either of us. If your book comes with a research library, you know where to go. For everyone else: open Reverie</a>, type three asterisks and a line about the scene you’ve been carrying around all day, and see which app you’re still thinking about next week.
Mark

My Thoughts on AI

2026-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

AI, what a subject. It draws a lot of emotive reaction. So I thought I’d sit down, think it through properly, and give you my views.
When I look at AI, there’s a part of me, the sci-fi part, that thinks it’s very cool, and that it’s an exciting time to be alive. And then there’s the thriller part, the one that thinks the dystopian robot takeover is inevitable. Exciting and scary at the same time.
But we’re probably thinking about it from the point of view of the author. And I do have strong views here. In creating Reverie, I wouldn’t have made such a big deal of the feel of the editor if I didn’t want people to write in it. It’s for us, the humans, to write. It’s certainly not a place for AI. If I wanted to build an AI novel writing system, it would look very different.
But I don’t want to build one, because I don’t think it has a place. I genuinely worry about where all this is going. AI is generating so much content now, and then learning from its own output, that I think it’ll become some self-feedback monster that homogenises everything into the same plain and boring prose. You can already see it in AI images. You can’t always say why, but you feel it. There’s something a bit too clean about them, a bit too predictable, and everything starts to look the same once everyone is using the same tools. Writing is going the same way. When a tool finishes your sentences for you, the voice that comes out isn’t quite yours. It’s yours mixed in with everything the machine has ever read. But that’s not even the point.
Writing is about telling a story we want to tell. It’s a craft. It’s something that wants to jump out of us onto the page. And AI generated stories are really just being made to shortcut at best, and at worst so people can ‘churn’ out content for pure financial gain.
So that said, I can promise you that Reverie is about you. The human. About helping you tell your story without an AI in the way to distract you. To help you get in the flow and tell that story.
Mark

Organising a Novel Without Outlining: A Discovery Writer's Approach

2026-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Structure for the writer who finds the story by writing it.

Being a discovery writer works exactly the way you want it to, right up until it doesn’t. You sit down, you write the scene that’s in your head, you write the next one, and you keep going. No plan, no outline, no folders to fill in first. That’s the whole point. The story comes out because nothing made you stop and decide where it was supposed to go.
And then one day the draft is sixty thousand words long and you need to find the scene where she finds the letter. You know it’s in there. You scroll. You scroll back. You use find, but you can’t remember the exact words, so you search for “letter” and get forty hits. Or worse: you realise two scenes are in the wrong order, and fixing it means selecting three thousand words without losing a paragraph, cutting, scrolling, finding the seam, pasting, and reading the joins to make sure you didn’t break anything. The thing that made drafting easy is now making revision hard.
I wrote a whole post about why I left Scrivener. It’s a powerful, carefully made tool, and for writers who plan before they draft it’s a great one. I’m just not that writer. I’m a discovery writer, and being asked to organise before I’d written anything just screeches me to a halt. But near the end of that post I also wrote that there’s a real need for the organisational side of novel writing, and that it was a problem I’d love to take a proper run at someday. This is the first part of that run. The trick was to do it without recreating the thing that had stopped me: structure you have to build before you write.
The structure is already there</h2>
You didn’t plan your draft, but you didn’t write it as one shapeless block either. When one scene ended and another began, you marked it. Maybe you typed a scene break: three asterisks, the little divider that’s been signalling “time and place have shifted” in manuscripts for a century. Maybe you wrote a heading. Maybe a chapter title. You did this without thinking about it, because it’s how writing works: you put a small mark between the thing that ended and the thing that started.
That mark is structure. You made it while you were writing, not before. Reverie reads it back to you.
Open the sidebar and you get a list of your scenes, in order, each one labelled with its first line. Click one and you’re there. That’s it. You didn’t build the list. You didn’t drag anything into folders or fill in a synopsis card. The list is a reflection of what you already wrote, surfaced at the moment you need it and absent every other moment.
This is the whole difference. The planning-first approach gives you a structure to fill in before you’ve written a word, and asks you to know where things go before they exist. Reverie waits until you’ve written, then shows you what’s there. One way asks you to plan up front; the other reflects what you’ve already made. For a discovery writer that distinction is everything, because the planning is exactly the part that never worked.
You decide what counts as a scene, too. A scene break always does; that’s what it’s for. Headings are up to you: maybe your chapter titles are the unit you think in, maybe it’s the sections under them. You tick the ones that matter to how you see the draft, and the list reorganises to match. Reverie isn’t deciding your structure. It’s reading the one you made.
What it costs</h2>
I have to be straight about the tension here. Reverie is built on the idea that there should be nothing on the page but your words. No binder, no corkboard, nothing sitting beside the text. A sidebar full of scenes is exactly the kind of thing that idea is built against, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
So here’s the trade. The sidebar is a panel. When it’s open, it sits beside your text and nudges the page over to make room. That’s a real cost. It’s chrome, and Reverie’s whole argument is that chrome is what pulls you out. What it buys is that on the day you can’t find the letter scene, you find it in a second instead of a minute, and the minute is the one that ends the session.
The resolution I landed on is that the panel is off until you ask for it. The default is still a page and nothing else. The structure is computed quietly whether you’re looking at it or not, so it’s instant when you open the sidebar, but it doesn’t exist on screen until you reach for it with a keystroke. You get the page you came for while you’re drafting, and the map when you’re revising. Those are different jobs, and they happen at different times, so the tool can be two things without being two things at once.
It also means the feature does nothing until you’ve given it something to read. Write one long unbroken draft with no breaks and no headings and the sidebar stays empty, because there’s no structure to show until you’ve made some. The empty sidebar is correct. It waits until you’ve done the part only you can do, then shows you what’s there.
Moving a scene</h2>
Finding a scene is one half. Moving one is the other. The list of scenes is also a list you can reorder. Drag a scene to where it belongs and the words actually move, the whole span lifted and set down in the right place, the joins handled for you. That’s the part that turns “I know these two scenes are in the wrong order” from an afternoon of careful cutting into a single gesture. The way scenes are detected is the foundation it stands on. The same drag moves a whole chapter when a chapter is the thing in the wrong place, so the order you discovered becomes the order on the page.
The manuscript at the end</h2>
There’s one more part, and it’s the one that makes the rest worth doing. Finding your way around a draft is good. Sending it is the point.
When the writing is finished, Reverie takes the whole folder and exports it as a single manuscript in the format agents and editors expect. Times New Roman, double-spaced, a title page with your name and the word count, each chapter starting a new page, scene breaks marked the way they’ve been marked for a century. You set none of it up. You wrote in plain Markdown the entire time, on a page that asked nothing of you, and at the end you get a file that’s ready to submit.
So the whole path runs inside one app. You start on a blank page and find the story by writing it. The marks you left become a map when you need one. The scenes and chapters move when the order turns out wrong. And when it’s done, it leaves as a manuscript a publisher can open and read, with no planning at the start and no second tool at the end.
None of this changes when you write or how. You still sit down to a page that asks nothing of you. You still find the story by writing it. The organising waits, the way it’s supposed to, until there’s something to organise. Then it’s there, made out of the marks you left yourself, asking you to plan exactly nothing.
— Mark

The Best Writing App for Novelists: What I Found After Years of Searching

2026-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

What I liked, what I didn’t, and why none of them were quite right.


I’ve been writing on and off for twenty years and developing software for longer. I’ve tried most of the writing apps you’ve heard of and several you haven’t. Some of them are very good. None of them were right for me, and it took a long time to understand why.
This isn’t a features comparison. There are plenty of those. This is what it actually felt like to sit down and try to write in each one.
Microsoft Word</h2>
microsoft.com/microsoft-365</a> | From $99.99/yr, £84.99/yr, €99/yr (Microsoft 365 Personal)
Where most of us start. Where most of us stay longer than we should.
Word is built for documents, not for writing. There’s a difference. The toolbar alone has more options than I’ll use in a lifetime. Margins, headers, page numbers, track changes, comment bubbles. I’d open it to write a chapter and spend ten minutes adjusting the view before typing a word. Yes, Focus Mode exists. It hides the ribbon and gives you a cleaner view. But bolting a calm room onto the front of a factory doesn’t make it a writing tool.
The page feels clinical. White rectangle, black text, blinking cursor. No warmth, no personality. It’s paper on a screen, and not particularly good paper.
What it does well: track changes is genuinely useful when working with an editor, and the file format is the lingua franca of publishing. But for the act of writing? For sitting down with a blank page and trying to make words happen? It’s the wrong room.

Google Docs</h2>
docs.google.com</a> | Free
I had access to it, so I used it for a while. It’s convenient. No install, no file management, just a browser tab.
But I never got comfortable writing fiction in a browser. The page felt flat, more like a spreadsheet with better fonts than a place to do creative work. And I could never shake the sense that my writing lived on someone else’s computer, in someone else’s tab, one accidental close away from breaking my train of thought.

Scrivener</h2>
literatureandlatte.com</a> | $59.99/£59.99/€69.99 one-time
The one everyone recommends. The one I wanted to love.
Scrivener is powerful. The binder, the corkboard, the inspector, the ability to organise your manuscript into scenes and chapters and move them around. For writers who plan extensively, who outline before they draft, it’s built for exactly that.
My problem was that I’m not that writer. I’m a discovery writer. I find the story by writing it, not by planning it. I don’t know where a chapter belongs until I’ve written the chapters around it. Scrivener wanted me to organise first and write second, and that stopped me cold. I’d open it, see the empty folders and the structure waiting to be filled in, and close it. The app became another thing to manage instead of a place to write.
There’s a real need for the organisational side of novel writing, things like worldbuilding, character tracking, plot structure. Tools like Obsidian fill some of that gap, though none of them do it in a way that feels native to fiction. It’s a fascinating problem, and one I’d love to take a proper run at someday.
When I did get past the setup and actually wrote in Scrivener, the writing surface was fine. Clean enough. But “fine” is a low bar for the place where you spend the most important hours of your creative work.
No AI, no subscription. Those are real strengths. If you’re a plotter, if structure helps you think, Scrivener might be exactly what you need. It just wasn’t what I needed.

Ulysses</h2>
ulysses.app</a> | $5.99/£5.99/€5.99 per month, Mac and iOS only
Beautiful app. The best-looking writing experience on the Mac for a long time.
I loved the library. Everything in one place, organised by groups, searchable, synced across devices. The Markdown editor is clean and well-made. Publishing to WordPress directly from the app is clever. The writing experience is pleasant.
Two things pushed me away. The first is the subscription. We live in a world now where everything is a monthly payment, designed to feel cheap in the moment but adding up to far more in the long run. Open your bank statement and count the direct debits. It’s exhausting. And a writing app is the worst place for it. During a dry spell, the subscription made me feel guilty for not opening the app. During a productive stretch, I’d wonder whether I was writing because I wanted to or because I was trying to justify the cost. A creative tool shouldn’t carry that weight.
The second thing is harder to pin down. Ulysses is a very good container for writing. But the page itself, the moment of sitting down and typing, felt the same as every other app. Clean, minimal, static. The words went in and sat there. Nothing about the environment made me want to stay longer or come back sooner.

iA Writer</h2>
ia.net/writer</a> | $49.99/£49.99/€49.99 one-time (Mac), $29.99 (Windows)
The purest of the minimal editors. iA Writer strips everything away until there’s nothing left but text.
It’s opinionated in ways I respect. A small set of carefully chosen fonts. No formatting toolbar. Focus mode dims everything except the sentence you’re writing. The design is rigorous and the philosophy is clear: fewer distractions, better writing.
I have a lot of time for iA Writer. Their stance on AI, building Authorship to expose machine-written text instead of generating it, is the most thoughtful response any writing app has made.
But iA Writer is a Markdown editor, and it asks you to think that way. You’re writing in a syntax, not on a page. For developers and technical writers that’s natural. For a novelist who just wants to sit down and write a scene, it’s a layer of friction between you and the words. The writing should feel like writing, not like formatting.
The deeper issue is what kind of minimal it is. iA Writer’s minimalism is clinical. Everything has been removed, and you feel the absence. The page is stark, the cursor blinks, and you’re conscious of the emptiness in a way that puts you on edge rather than putting you at ease. Both iA Writer and Reverie are minimal. But there’s a difference between a room that’s been stripped bare and a room that’s so well considered you settle into it without thinking. One leaves you alert and aware of yourself. The other lets you relax. And when you’re relaxed, the words come easier. Not because of anything the app is doing. Because your guard is down.

What I actually wanted</h2>
After years of switching apps I could finally name the thing that was missing from all of them. Not a feature. A feeling.
Every app gave me a surface to write on. None of them made me want to stay there. On the hard days, the days when the blank page wins, every editor felt the same. Static, clinical, indifferent. The cursor blinked. I stared at it. I closed the app.
I wanted a page that met me halfway. Not with suggestions or AI or gamification. Something subtler. A page that felt alive. That responded to the act of writing in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on but could feel immediately when it was gone.
I wanted to open my draft and feel like I was continuing, not starting. I wanted the app to know when the words were flowing and to quietly, invisibly, make the room a little warmer. I wanted to look up after twenty minutes and not know where the time went.
No app I tried did this. Not because they were bad. Because nobody was trying.
So I built Reverie</a>.
— Mark

Introducing Reverie

2026-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

A writing app for the writer who wants to write but isn’t writing.

I’m a developer by trade. I’ve been one for over twenty years. But I’ve also been a writer, on and off, for as long as I can remember. The kind of writer who has half-finished essays in folders, ideas in notebooks, the feeling of “I should be writing more” that never quite turns into writing more.
A few years ago I noticed something specific. I’d open Scrivener, see the binder, the corkboard, the inspector, the project structure, and close it. I’d renew Ulysses for another year and barely write in it. I’d open a Google Doc and feel nothing. The cursor blinking on a flat white expanse about as inviting as a spreadsheet.
The tools were excellent. They were not the problem. The problem was that every time I sat down to write, the interface was asking me to do something other than write. Plan a structure. Pick a folder. Set up a project. Choose between fifteen formatting options. Decide where this paragraph “belongs.”
And on the days I did get past that, when I actually started typing, something else would pull me out within minutes. A notification. A spell-check underline. A sudden urge to adjust margins. The cursor blinking on a clinical surface that broke the spell every time my eye landed on it.
I wanted a page that asked nothing of me except that I write on it. And once I started, kept me there.
So I built one.
What Reverie is</h2>
Reverie is a writing app where the page feels alive. The cursor glows softly. The scroll settles with weight. Formatting animates into place. The page warms when you’re in flow and cools when you pause, all below the threshold of conscious attention. You don’t notice these things directly. You notice that writing in Reverie is different from writing in anything else.
What you type is what you see. A heading looks like a heading. Bold looks like bold. There are no asterisks, no hashes, no syntax to learn or hide. Just text, rendered as text.
Your writing is saved as Markdown, the most common format in writing tools today. Open your files in any other app, on any other machine, in twenty years’ time. They’re yours. There’s no database, no proprietary format, no cloud account, no lock-in.
What Reverie is not</h2>
There’s no binder and no corkboard, no structure you have to build before you write. When the work gets longer, save your files to a folder and Reverie treats them as a manuscript. Switch between documents with a keystroke. Word count rolls up across everything. No setup, and nothing on the page but your words.
It’s not Ulysses. No subscription. Pay once, own it. No account required.
It’s not a Notes app. It’s built for chapters and long-form work, not lists and shopping reminders.
It has no AI. No plugins. No themes store. No collaboration.
These are choices, not omissions. Every “no” is something I actively decided not to build.
Why now</h2>
I’ve been making things feel right on screen since I started shipping games twenty-five years ago. Most of that work is invisible: the weight of a scroll, the way light sits on a surface, the gap between an animation that feels alive and one that feels like a tech demo. Games teach you that feel is engineering. Nobody calls it that, but it is.
Writing apps have never done this work. They give you a white rectangle, a blinking cursor, and nothing else. Reverie is what happens when you bring that attention to a page.
No investors, no co-founders, no roadmap committee. A craft project that became a product because enough early readers said “I would pay for this.”
The bet I’m making is that if five minutes in Reverie makes every other writing app feel dead, writers will stay. The page is the product. Everything else is in service of getting out of its way.
Coming soon</h2>
Reverie isn’t ready yet. When it is, I’ll announce it here and email everyone on the homepage</a> list.
If you write, or want to, I hope it gives you a page worth opening.
— Mark

The Neuroscience of the Page

2026-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Why I built a writing app that knows when you’re in the zone.

You know the moment it breaks. You never notice flow arriving, but the end of it is sharp and unmistakable. A notification slides in. A word count updates. You glance at a toolbar you didn’t need and suddenly you’re aware of the cursor, the font, the room, yourself. The sentence you were about to write is gone. It was forming, and now it isn’t.
You sit for a while. You re-read what you’ve got. You write something, delete it, write it again. The thing that was carrying you forward ten seconds ago has stopped, and no amount of staring at the screen brings it back.
Every writer knows this. The state where the words come easily, where you look up and an hour has passed and there are pages you barely remember writing. It’s real and recognisable. So is the knowledge that it’s fragile. That the wrong interruption at the wrong moment doesn’t just pause it. It ends it.
What’s less well known is that neuroscience can explain exactly what’s happening. Researchers like Arne Dietrich have shown that flow isn’t your brain working harder. The regions responsible for self-monitoring and self-criticism, the voice that asks is this sentence any good?, go quiet. The parts that actually do the work get sharper. It’s a measurable neural configuration, and it has a measurable vulnerability. Even a small visual distraction in the wrong place can trip the mechanism that brings the critic back online.
I read that research and asked a question that seemed obvious but that nobody in the writing-app space had asked: what if the app was designed around protecting that state? A page that’s trying, quietly, to keep your inner critic asleep.

The blank page is the enemy. Not because it’s empty, but because of what it does to your brain. Research on goal pursuit has shown that people push harder as they approach a finish line, and they’re far more likely to keep going if they feel they’ve already started. A fresh document with a blinking cursor in the top-left corner says you have done nothing. It’s the worst possible emotional starting point for someone who is already struggling to begin.
So Reverie doesn’t give you a cold page. When you open yesterday’s draft, the page carries a trace of where you left off. Not a summary or a note to yourself, but a warmth. A sense that work has already happened here. You’re continuing, not starting. The difference is subtle, and it matters more than it should.
As you write, Reverie watches how you write, not what. Your typing rhythm, it turns out, is remarkably specific. Research published in Nature Scientific Reports has shown that the pattern of pauses between keystrokes closely tracks whether words are coming fluently or whether you’re searching. Not the speed. The pattern. Steady, rhythmic gaps mean the language is flowing. Erratic gaps mean it isn’t.
Reverie reads that rhythm and responds through the environment itself. When the words are coming, the page warms so slowly you’d never catch it happening. When you stop, it cools. The changes are calibrated against perceptual research. Slow enough, peripheral enough, and small enough that your conscious mind never registers them. Your emotional brain does. You feel supported without knowing why.
I borrowed something from game design, too. When you hit a milestone, the page sometimes responds with a quiet visual moment. Sometimes it doesn’t. That inconsistency is deliberate. Predictable rewards stop feeling like rewards. Unpredictable ones keep the brain’s reward system engaged. It’s the difference between a loyalty card and a slot machine, applied with the lightest possible touch.
The whole system runs at a fraction of what a game designer would call noticeable. There are no fireworks, no confetti, no screen shake. The test I use is simple: spend twenty minutes writing in Reverie, then open another editor. If the other editor feels dead, if something is missing that you can’t name, I’ve got it right.

A few things Reverie will never do.
There’s no AI. No generation, no suggestions, no rewriting. The app exists to support your relationship with the page, not to replace it. If you want to stare at a sentence for ten minutes until the right word arrives, that’s writing. I’m not going to short-circuit it.
There is a goals panel. It tracks your word count, your session time, your time in flow. But it never shows up on its own. You open it when you’re ready, not before. The writer should never feel watched while writing. That’s the core design constraint. The moment you become consciously aware of the feedback, it activates exactly the brain region I’m trying to keep quiet.
Your files are plain Markdown. No lock-in. You can use Reverie for your morning pages and keep your manuscript in Scrivener. I’m not trying to own your writing life. I’m trying to be the place where the words come easiest.

Whether the calibration is right, whether the thresholds land where the research says they should, is something only real writers using it daily will tell me.
Your writing environment should make the act of writing feel subtly, continuously, almost imperceptibly better. Not through features or AI, but through a page that responds to you in ways you never quite catch it doing.

Reverie

Reverie Writing Has No Sync. How Will Your Novel Sync on iPad and iPhone?

Reverie vs Word and Google Docs, from the Maker of Reverie

I Spent 25 Years Making Games. Then I Made a Writing App.

Reverie vs Scrivener, from the Maker of Reverie

My Thoughts on AI

Organising a Novel Without Outlining: A Discovery Writer's Approach

The Best Writing App for Novelists: What I Found After Years of Searching

Introducing Reverie

Coming soon</h2> Reverie isn’t ready yet. When it is, I’ll announce it here and email everyone on the homepage</a> list.</p> If you write, or want to, I hope it gives you a page worth opening.</p> — Mark</p>

The Neuroscience of the Page

Coming soon</h2>
Reverie isn’t ready yet. When it is, I’ll announce it here and email everyone on the homepage</a> list.</p>
If you write, or want to, I hope it gives you a page worth opening.</p>
— Mark</p>