I am a Chromebook owner. Not a proud one, just an owner. I wrote a while ago about trying to do screenwriting on it and came away nonplussed. But there was a fair amount of interest in the subject and I find myself frequently trying out new tools, so I’ve decided to write about Chromebook friendly tools when I come across them.
Which leads me to something called MasterWriter. Lately I’ve been writing some poetry and have turned to my trusty thesaurus and a number of word rhyming tools to get me through my couplets. I received a promotional code for MasterWriter and decided to take it for a spin.
It’s not really a screenwriting tool, but it is a general creative writing helper with a heavy emphasis on assisting with song writing. For the purposes of my mini-review, I’m ignoring the song writing based features. The main functionality of the tool is finding the right word, be that a rhyme, synonym, or the name of a proper place or person. Most of that functionality can be had for free from a variety of websites, but MasterWriter does a pretty good job of presenting the information in a very clean, straightforward way. But what makes all that word finding useful is the ability to collect and add words to your projects, be they poems, songs or anything else.
For my poem writing, I’d being using a spreadsheet (yeah, I know, the irony) to compose, collect words, and count syllables. It works, but it’s not the greatest tool set and you have to jump through a few hoops to make it work across laptops and mobile devices. MasterWriter is fully cross platform via browser, but you do need an internet connection. You can have as many projects (in my case poems) as you want and each project gets it’s own bank of words.
Overall, I really liked MasterWriter’s interface and toolset. The word hunting tools are the best I’ve used across any website or app. But MasterWriter doesn’t come cheap. Monthly plans are $9.95 with discounts for annual buys. Considering I will be lucky to make $10 off of my poems, I have a hard time coughing up a credit card for this particular service. But if you have the money and want a great multi-platform tool finding just the right word, it’s worth checking out MasterWriter’s free trial.