Top 10 reasons to use Shaxpir for NaNoWriMo this year
(#7 will blow your mind)
You’re ready.
You’ve been brainstorming this novel for as long as you can remember. You know how it begins, and you know how it ends. You’ve built a rich, elaborate story world, and now it’s time to bring it to life. You’ve got 30 days to finish a first draft, and it all begins on November 1st.
Yes, it’s that time of year again!
National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a, NaNoWriMo) is about to begin, and there’s no better writing platform than Shaxpir (pronounced exactly like “Shakespeare”) to help you achieve your goals as an author.
You can download Shaxpir for free and explore for yourself.
Here are ten reasons we think you’ll love it…
#1: Set Goals and Track Your Progress
You know the math. To cross the NaNoWriMo finish line, you need to write 50,000 words this month. That works out to an average of 1,667 words every single day. It’ll be challenging, for sure, but with the right discipline and excellent tools, we know you can do it!
Shaxpir keeps track of the time you spend writing, and the number of words you write each day, so that you can meet your goals this month, and develop a writing habit that will last a lifetime.
It’s like having a fitbit for your writing life.
#2: Build the world of your story
The brainstorming process can be crazy. Ideas coming at you from every direction: characters, places, themes, plot-points, monsters, magic, mayhem.
Shaxpir keeps track of it all in a dedicated notebook integrated right into your writing environment. You can even create connections and cross-references between your notes, representing character relationships, foreshadowing plot-points, or charting the metaphorical symbolism of your nine-act structure.
Whatever you need.
Whether you’re jotting down a few quick world-building ideas, or creating a story-bible for your seven-part epic fantasy series, it’s like having a private wikipedia for the world of your story.
#3: Think visually
Fill your notebook with concept artwork. Inspire yourself to fill your scenes with color and texture, and bring your characters to life.
There’s no limit to the amount of concept artwork you can include in your notebook, so go nuts!
#4: Tinker With Structure
Shaxpir give you the creative freedom to build your manuscript however you like. Assemble a hierarchy of individual chapters, scenes, prologues, epilogues, etc.
Drag-and-drop those building blocks into any order. When you’re ready to publish, you can choose how to assemble them into a finished manuscript.
#5: Track Your Changes
Every time you login to Shaxpir, it keeps track of the changes you make during that writing session. Whether two weeks or two years from now, you can look back at the historical record anytime and even restore the text of a paragraph long ago discarded.
#6: Improve Your Prose
Shaxpir is the only writing platform in the world that integrates seamlessly with the linguistics engine at prosecraft.io
This incredible resource analyzes the literary style of more than 580 million words of prose — including 5,979 books by 3,453 popular authors, and growing every day — so you can understand exactly how your writing style compares with the authors you admire.
With Shaxpir, you can see linguistic measures — vividness, passive voice, adverbs, and sentiment analysis — applied to your own writing in real time with gorgeous text highlighting.
Shaxpir can show you a detailed summary of the writing style in each of your projects.
Shaxpir doesn’t tell you how to write. It just helps you understand your stylistic quirks, so that you can make mindful linguistic choices.
#7: Chart the Emotional Arc of Your Story
By analyzing the balance between positive words (like “home” and “trust”) and negative words (like “disaster” and “fighting”), Shaxpir can actually show an author the changing emotional intensity of their story arc. With tools like this, an author can more mindfully craft the language of their prose to match the intended arc of the characters’ journey.
It’s all based on cutting-edge research pioneered by the geniuses at the UVM Computational Story Lab , and now it’s available to any author in the world.
#8: Publish & Export
When you finish writing your novel, you can publish an ebook with the push of a button. Shaxpir can generate an industry-standard EPUB file — compatible with the Kindle, Nook, or iBooks stores — and complete with cover artwork and a table-of-contents. You can even export Microsoft Word documents from any of your projects, to share with colleagues, literary agents, or editors.
#9: Work from Anywhere and Stay in Sync
Tired of emailing word documents to yourself, just so that you can write a few chapters over your lunch break?
Shaxpir is a desktop application, for Windows and Macintosh, but it synchronizes its data in the cloud. So you can start a new novel on your computer at home, write a few chapters at work on your lunch break, and pick up right where you left off when you get back home.
Or you can unplug from the matrix completely and spend a week writing from a cabin in the woods. All your changes will be stored securely on your hard drive, and when you return to civilization and login to Shaxpir again, all your new work will automatically synchronize to the cloud.
The data is encrypted in your local cache, and transmitted over SSL to our secure database in the cloud, where we make continuous off-site backups of everything. So your words are always safe, and you can worry about more important things, like telling a great story.
#10: Be a Part of Something Bigger
We believe that stories are the fundamental unit of human culture. Whether through fiction or nonfiction, on the printed page, at the cinema, or around the dinner table, stories are how we explore ourselves and grapple with the challenges of life. Storytelling is the most human thing we do.
Our mission is to gather together the world’s storytellers, equip them with the finest writing tools, orchestrate their collaboration, and share their stories with readers everywhere.
And we’ve barely begun.
We have some incredible new features planned for the next year, and we can’t wait to see how those tools will change your writing for the better.
So come join the world’s most exciting new writing community, and have an incredible NaNoWriMo this year!
Sign Up Today
Try it for yourself. Download Shaxpir for free and see how it can change your writing life.
Shaxpir is always free to try for your first 30 days. After that, a subscription to our premium service, Shaxpir 4: Pro, is just $7.99 a month and includes all of our most advanced writing tools and linguistic algorithms.
For authors on a tight budget, we also offer Shaxpir 4: Everyone, which includes all the essential writing and publishing tools you need to finish your novel, completely free of charge. You can upgrade and downgrade anytime, at your own convenience, whenever you need the power of our professional suite of tools.
