You can purchase add-ons, but the main program is free. You can write everything from novels to TV scripts on it.

https://www.celtx.com/index.html

If you're on Windows.

And then write.

I used MS Word and WhiteSmoke as a grammar program. I assume there must be an advantage to a writing program, and I looked at few but was never convinced one would really help me.

Congratulations on deciding to write a book; it’s fun, frustrating, and rewarding all at the same time. I found the writing much easier than the editing, which is proving to be tedious and time consuming.

I use two writing blog sites a lot. One is the Bookshelf Muse; this blog has an Emotional Thesaurus, which is wonderful if you are writing fictional characters.

http://thebookshelfmuse.blogspot.com/

The other is Daily Writing Tips…I love this site. It’s a series of articles and has great information about the craft of writing on it, and includes fiction, non-fiction, journalism, and other writing forms. The site also offers a Daily Writing Tips sent via email.

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/

Good luck and enjoy the process.

I love both of these sites. Hope they work well for you.

It is the result of a number of dreams I have had in the last several years. They all tie together, I would, and still do, wake up and write notes. None of the notes are specific but all tie together.

All word processing programs will work for you as a writer. But then when it comes time to submitting, editing, etc., you'll be working with publishers and Microsoft Word is one they like to work with.

It facitilates any method of writing, and exports so that Microsoft Word (rightly or wrong the industry standard, you decide).

Really. You don't need a fancy computer to write a book, the most popular novel of the last twenty years, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, was written on a yellow steno-pad. On The Road by Jack Kerouac was written on a roll of toilet paper. Hemingway wrote on a typewriter. The majority of best selling novels through history were written on basic technology, the majority of those using pen and paper.

The best writing instructor I ever had made us do all of our composition in MS Notepad so that we couldn't worry about formatting, font, pagination, word-count or anything other than our writing. That's my recommendation. Write in Notepad. When you're finished composing, edit in a word-processing suite like Word. You'll write better for it. There's nothing there to distract. There's nothing there but your words. That's all you need and more than that is usually a detriment to the product. Publishers have people they pay a lot of money to make it look pretty; they're paying you to put words on the page.

When I teach writing courses for prose or poetry, I forbid my students the use of anything fancier than Notepad. Fancy writing software suites make bad writers and do nothing to improve the work-output of good ones.

Also, disconnect your internet and take the phone off the hook. Writing time is writing time and should be protected from intrusion. When the words stop coming or you start to make mistakes or feel compelled to go back and edit what you just wrote, hang it up for the day.

Notepad.

I use MS Word. Courier New, 12 pitch. I have noticed that novice writers want to use fancier fonts, and never believe me when I try to tell them that if they're ever going to submit anything it has to look as if it were typed.

Many years ago, before the computers had windows, my husband would use Notepad for all sorts of stuff and encouraged me to use it. Seems as though as soon as you closed it, whatever had been written disappeared.

Word is perfectly fine. Just don't do any fancy formatting. There is an on-line site I submit to, and they want you to have saved your piece as a .txt, then copy and paste it into the form they use for you to submit. That gets rid of all the weird formatting. Maybe we could all write our stuff in a .txt document and that would be like notepad.

Floating underneath Word and all the others is stuff that sometimes you never chose, never was conscious of. Then formatting warts like broken lines, missing rearranged texts, unfixable font differences appear long after you did something you can't remember.

All the book preparations pretty much make it advisable to write first with as little formatting as humanly possible and then you can adapt the same basic manuscript for all the media and do it yourself much easier- as in creating a Kindle e-book with MobiPocket.

However for the sake of my eyes some different view is necessary. Large bolder font and colored background that can be easily dumped. It is always good to hear your work. I guess some people can't hear the sometimes godawful disconnect between written and spoken language. It's often like Jekyll and Hyde.

They're what you use before you do the final formatting in a Word processor like MS Word.

They both break up chapters into scenes. yWriter has lots of fields and sections to capture data about the scene/book. Scrivener has some but allows you to create your own. Both are good.

For my first few novels, I was having trouble storing ideas or calendar dates or subplots I wanted to work in. These writing programs solve that problem. I wrote a couple books on yWriter and decided to give Scrivener a try, so I'm using that now.

Some writing programs do your plotting for you (as I understand it). That takes the fun out of writing a novel for me.

yWriter
http://spacejock.com/yWriter5.html

Scrivener
http://literatureandlatte.com/

Oh, yeah, and both are written by Brits, so the spelling isn't American.

But maybe this isn't what you want. Maybe you want something that will be more of a nanny program. Don't know what to suggest for that.

on edit
Write It Now looks pretty good.
http://www.amazon.com/WriteItNow-4/dp/B002PRIT0O/ref=sr_1_4?s=software&ie=UTF8&qid=1363220316&sr=1-4&keywords=novel+writing

However right now I am trying to convert from XP to Windows 8. Lost as a goose and loosing feathers fast!

Even the folks whose day job is selling computers aren't happy about Windows 8. I won't be replacing my laptop any time soon, not as long as Windows 8 is out there.

Scrivener's sort of a mutation on word-processing, designed for serious writing.

It has several different ways of organizing your draft and your notes - you've got a binder, you can display things in outline format, and it gives you a corkboard so you can do the corkboard and index-cards style writeups like many writers do. It's designed to help you through the writing process all the way to finishing your first draft, at which point you can convert it into a .doc or .docx suitable for editing with MS Word, or .odt for LibreOffice, or ebook formats like .epub so you can put the book on your Kindle or Nook.

It's available for Mac OS, Windows or Linux.

Check it out here: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

I'm using it for a first novel and although there were a few days when I was scratching my head (there's a learning curve), I am so glad I've invested the time to learn how to use it.

It's a magnificent program that I'm convinced is helping me write a better book than I'd be writing otherwise.

What's your novel about?

It's a story, loosely-based on personal experience, that involves a guy, a girl, a whole lotta obstacles, some danger, and some law enforcement types. That's all I'm sayin'. (I'm of the keep-it-a-secret-until-the-first-draft's-done school.)

I've tried a few but I have found Open Office as good as any. Of course, I did have to buy Word because it makes it so much easier in working with publishers since that is what they use.

I just found out about it from the nanowrimo website; apparently it's been out for a couple years.

http://www.getyarny.com/