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Mar. 4th, 2010 05:41 amyWriter is one nifty little piece of software! I've always been happy with Roughdraft as my word processor (and will keep using it for short oneshots that only have a few scenes at most) but when I saw people singing its praises over at Journalfen I decided to download it on a whim to see how well it handled the various tasks it claims to be able to juggle, and two minutes into poking around with it were enough to show me that it could at least be very useful for outlining long stories even if the actual word processor part of it is too cluttered for my tastes.
Basically the draw of it is that when you click on a chapter it gives you a neat little spreadsheet of the scenes you want to put in it that gives you a quick at-a-glance summary of what's happening in that scene. The viewpoint character, who else show up, where they are, a brief description of what happens, and a few other things. Realize in chapter five that a character really needed to find out a certain piece of information before then? It only takes a second to find a scene that they were in and add something about that to your notes at the bottom of the screen about what needs to happen in it, or to add a brand new one. Decide that a certain scene should have happened two chapters later? You can drag and drop it there in two seconds. Then at the bottom of the screen is the section for fleshing it all out and inputting the scene itself.
There are tons of things you can do besides that, of course (just the spreadsheet wouldn't make much of an outline, after all, even if you never got into the actual word processing parts of the program), but like I said I'm happy with the program I usually use when it comes to the actual writing. But when it comes to outlining I've never come across a program that does it so neatly before.
Basically the draw of it is that when you click on a chapter it gives you a neat little spreadsheet of the scenes you want to put in it that gives you a quick at-a-glance summary of what's happening in that scene. The viewpoint character, who else show up, where they are, a brief description of what happens, and a few other things. Realize in chapter five that a character really needed to find out a certain piece of information before then? It only takes a second to find a scene that they were in and add something about that to your notes at the bottom of the screen about what needs to happen in it, or to add a brand new one. Decide that a certain scene should have happened two chapters later? You can drag and drop it there in two seconds. Then at the bottom of the screen is the section for fleshing it all out and inputting the scene itself.
There are tons of things you can do besides that, of course (just the spreadsheet wouldn't make much of an outline, after all, even if you never got into the actual word processing parts of the program), but like I said I'm happy with the program I usually use when it comes to the actual writing. But when it comes to outlining I've never come across a program that does it so neatly before.