Reverie vs Word and Google Docs, from the Maker of Reverie

Word and Google Docs will hold a novel. I’ve never felt either was built to make you want to write one.

You didn’t choose either of them. They were already there. Word is the program every document on your computer already opens in. Google Docs is a tab you already had open. So the book starts wherever you happen to be, in a new blank file, and for the first few thousand words that’s fine.

And then the page feels like nothing. It’s the same flat white surface you’d use for a tax return, and it treats the most personal thing you’ll ever make exactly like a memo. Nothing about the room tells you a novel is being written in it. Once that’s pointed out you stop being able to unsee it, and over a few hundred hours alone with a manuscript the emptiness wears on you.

I make Reverie, so you know where I’m standing. But I wrote fiction in both of these for years before I built anything, and most of what follows is just what they do to a novel once it gets long.

What both of them get wrong

Start with the feel, because it’s the part nobody names. Word and Google Docs are competent and inert. The cursor blinks the way it has blinked since the eighties, and the page looks identical whether the words are pouring out or you’ve been stuck on one sentence for forty minutes. It never answers you, so it never puts you anywhere. You’re left to find the writing in yourself, against a surface that doesn’t care whether you write or not.

Under that sits a structural problem. A word processor thinks your book is one long document, and that single idea causes most of the practical pain. Ninety thousand words becomes a scroll with no shape you can hold. Moving chapter eleven ahead of chapter nine means cutting it out and hunting down the place to drop it, hoping you didn’t strand a scene on the way. The shape of the book stays in your head and never reaches the screen, and the further you get the more of your attention goes to not losing your place.

Then there’s everything around the page, and none of it is for you. The toolbar holds a hundred controls a novelist never touches. A spell-check underline argues with your invented place name. A notification slides in. Then a comment in the margin, the waiting tabs, the rest of the application asking to be noticed. A novel gets written in the stretches where you forget the software is there, and neither of these was built to be forgotten.

And both are now adding the thing I most wanted kept out of the room. It isn’t only the offer to write your next sentence. It’s the suggestions and corrections that nudge a line toward what the machine would have written, and if you lean on them the voice that reaches the page stops being quite yours. It becomes yours blended with everything the model was trained on. Word has Copilot, Google Docs has Gemini, and you can switch them off.

Where they genuinely differ

Two honest differences. Google Docs is free, and for getting a draft in front of another person nothing beats it. The price is that the manuscript isn’t really yours: it sits on Google’s servers, you write inside a browser tab alongside everything else you have open, and the book lives somewhere you can’t quite put your hands on. Word is the format the industry runs on. Agents and publishers want a Word file, and its editing tools have had thirty years of sharpening. If a lot of your week is that kind of work, it earns its keep.

What Reverie does instead

Reverie is built the other way round, for the writing rather than the document.

It builds the structure as you write. A scene break is three asterisks on a line, the mark manuscripts have used for a century, and a single keystroke turns the scenes you’ve already written into an outline you can see, each one labelled by its first line. When chapter eleven needs to move, you drag it, and the words go with it, the whole passage lifted out and set down with the joins handled. Restructuring a novel takes seconds, not an afternoon.

Then the part a list can’t hold, which is how it feels. I spent twenty-five years making games, where the whole job is making a screen answer a person’s hands, and Reverie’s page is built with that same craft. It’s warm rather than clinical, and it responds to the act of writing, so that sitting down to it puts you in the frame to write instead of leaving you to find that frame yourself. That feeling is the reason the app exists, because what finishes a book is looking forward to the page.

There’s no AI in it, and there never will be. The whole point is that the voice on the page stays yours. It holds a whole novel and stays quick with it, the same on page six hundred as on page two. There’s almost nothing to format and little on the screen but your words, so there’s not much to do except write the next one.

Your manuscript stays on your machine, in plain files you own and can open in anything. When the book is ready to leave the room, Reverie exports it as a submission-ready manuscript in Shunn format, the layout agents and publishers expect, or as a Word file or a PDF.

None of this survives being described, which is the trouble with writing about feel at all. So I’ll stop trying. The trial is free for fifteen days, long enough to tell the difference between a page that tolerates a novel and one that wants the book out of you. Open it, type three asterisks and a line about the scene you’ve been carrying all day, and let the page make its own case.

Mark