Writing a novel in plain text has never been easier

I am happy to announce that my command line program for binding plain text writing files is live on my GitHub, with full documentation here, and I could not be happier with how it turned out.

But, you may ask, what is it, and why does it exist?

Quoting from the docs:

Binder applies source/build separation to writing—you author in plain text files and compile to a formatted manuscript.

This upends the word processing (or “WYSIWYG” editor) model that requires the writer to edit a build file (delivery format) as a source file. So you can write with the precision of a software engineer rather than the brute force labor of a printer’s devil.

There’s nothing wrong with using word processors like Microsoft Word, but these tools were designed for print formatting first and foremost. That’s why you have so many options for font sizes, page styles, and flow parameters, but very few text navigation or file organization features. Using such antiquated tools for writing today is like composing a novel by hand-setting movable type on a letterpress printer.

Composing in plain text frees you from those constraints and opens you up to the wide world of text editors with advanced text manipulation features, file and chapter organization, portability, and version control.

For my readers already familiar with Emacs and Org Mode, separating source files from build files is quite common. We can do that by exporting Org Mode documents to whatever format we’d like.

However, I wanted a tool that was text editor agnostic and focused more specifically on fiction writing and manuscript generation. So now, it doesn’t matter if you like Emacs, Vim, VS Code, Sublime, Gedit, or whatever, you can make good use of this program.

I particular like the --stats feature that outputs not only the total word count of all files, but also paragraph, sentence count, and a Flesch reading ease score.

Example output:

binder --stats

Manuscript Statistics
──────────────────────────────
  Words:                 45,678
  Paragraphs:            1,234
  Sentences:             2,345
  Words/Paragraph:       37.0
  Sentences/Paragraph:   1.9
  Flesch Reading Ease:   65.2 (Standard)

Nice.

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As always, thanks for reading. And be sure to check out my eBooks.

If you have any comments or questions feel free to drop them below.