First Look: Dabble

I took a look at the Dabble novel writing application. It's pretty nice!

I got a chance this afternoon to create an account on Dabble, a web application for novel writing. It's basically a word processor and hierarchical content management tool for organizing plot and character notes and maintaining a broken-down structure of your book for easy navigation and access. Some other nice tools are thrown in for good measure. The impetus to check it out came from a conversation on Twitter that started with a tongue-in-cheek dis-tweet about pitying Word users. The conversation eventually evolved into a discussion of tools and workflows in general, and one user suggested Dabble. I was curious and decided to give it a go.

My current writing workflow is Google Docs-based. My notes and reference material for characters and plot are stored in additional docs, as well as the Sheets application and notes in Google Keep. All that being said, I have no real allegiance to the Google tool suite. I have used it for work and I used it for all my grad school papers and analytical documents. I have also used it for my poetry and prose for a long time now. It was just there as default. I do like the ubiquity of it: I can use Docs on my laptop for my "main" writing, then do read-throughs and edits on my iPad in less formal settings, and I've even done some minor editing and typo correction on my phone.

Not being tied to a specific device and having your content accessible everywhere is extremely attractive and powerful. However, I saw things like Scrivener and I was jealous; it seemed like it had some really nice organizational features that would make my writing go more smoothly. But Scrivener just seemed too complex and feature-rich; it was also a locally-installed application with no real cloud support as far as I can tell. I had actually never heard of Dabble, but given that it ticked some of my most important boxes—ubiquity and simplicity—I felt it merited a trial run.

What I Like

• The interface is very clean and attractive. Scrivener—just on looks alone—looks very dated. Dabble is pretty sleek and reflects modern web design styling.

• "Focus" mode. When you're editing or just re-reading your work, Dabble detects idle pointer movement and fades out the side navigation and statics sidebars so you can focus on your work (you can also choose to go into focus mode on-demand). It seemed nice initially but I didn't give it much thought. After using it for a while, this is a surprisingly effective feature and really does keep you focused on your work. The sidebars reappear with mouse movement without any delay.

• Simple interface. Beyond the actual clean and attractive look of the interface, it's also very straightforward to use. There's not much that's not intuitive. There also seems to be a specific choice to limit the available tools and options to streamline the workflow for writing. I like that. This is one of the reasons I dislike both Scrivener and Word: they suffer from a glut of options, most of which I'll never use.

• Plot Grid. This looks cool, but since this is just a first look and I was just getting started, I didn't use it much. Plot grids gained some fame as the tool J.K. Rowling used to plot the Harry Potter books. If I end up using this, I'll write something up about it, but the Dabble folks tout it as a pretty significant feature. If you use hand-written plot grids, this will probably be attractive to you. I'm going to spend some time getting familiar with them soon.

• Various word counts. Dabble provides some metrics on word counts and allows you to set targets for words per day to keep you disciplined. I don't use these tools to prompt me to write, but it is kind of cool to see your various progress counts.

What I Don't Like

• No built-in dictionary. I would often look up words in Google Docs when I was researching or—just being honest here—if I wanted to use a word but wasn't sure if it was the right choice. The Dabble editor doesn't allow me to highlight a word and right-click to define the way Google Docs does. Not a big deal, I can just use a browser plug-in or go to a new tab, but a little bit of a drawback.

• Cost. Google Docs is free, Dabble isn't. I don't mind paying for a service if I like it, and I shell out a decent chunk of cash each month for Publisher's Marketplace, Autocrit, MasterWriter, and a few other services. So if I continue to like Dabble, I'll gladly pay for it. But it is something to keep in mind if you're using something free. There are several Dabble plans priced at $5, $10 and $15, each with correspondingly richer feature sets. You can read the reasoning behind Dabble's subscription model, which makes very good sense to me.

• It's standalone. Google Docs integrates with the other tools in the Google Docs and Drive suite. That's pretty nice. Dabble is its own thing, so any enhancements or integrations must be prioritized and coded by the Dabble developers themselves (it's actually hard to tell if there's more than one developer, Dabble may be a one-dev show). Google obviously has considerable resources to throw behind any new development, and hordes of developers to make it happen.

• It's a small company. There's nothing wrong with this, but the company seems to be pretty small. That means it could go under and your creative output could then be at risk. The company seems responsive and committed for what it's worth, but this is just a risk inherent in going with a smaller company.

Final Analysis

Again, this is a first look, not an in-depth review, but it's my intention to give Dabble a shot and give them my credit card info. I'll follow up after I've been using it for a while, but my first impressions are that this is a solid, attractive, and above all useful piece of software. I look forward to seeing what it can do for me and my writing.