Tools of the Trade, part 2

So I'm still poking through all the programs for writers. Storybook turned out to be another one that was more of a planner than a writing program, which shouldn't have surprised me, since it bills itself as a writing organizer. If I wanted a separate one of these, I think I'd really like it. I think it would be especially good for a multiple-viewpoint, ensemble-cast, multiple-storyline book, as it allows you to track which characters are in which places (as well as which characters are in which scenes, which a lot of other programs do). And the program is free under the GNU license.

I rather liked MyNovel. It's a free demo, pay $35 if you like it program. Unlike some of the earlier things I looked at, I had no trouble finding the word-processing part, which has a full-screen button and exports in useful file formats. I also liked having all my neatly organized notes available on a popup screen at one side whenever I wanted them, and I really liked being able to link characters to each other, to important places, and to events, independent of whether they were linked to particular scenes. I wasn't quite as fond of the forms it wanted you to fill out for each character, but there weren't a lot of required fields.

This one had a "diagrams" page rather than a corkboard, which I also liked because it seemed to be more flexible than the corkboards I've used. I could draw a geneology chart as easily as I could shift chapters around. I rate it B+. It'd be an A, except…

…Except I also tried yWriter5. Full disclosure: this was programmed by a writer net-acquaintance, which is how I came to know of it. It's free-please-donate, so the price is right, and in terms of features and flexibility, it does pretty much everything MyNovel does. It has things like character, location, and item tracking, a storyboard, etc. The online manual is a bit skimpy, but I found the program fairly intuitive to use and fun to poke around in when I couldn't see right off what I wanted to do. It organizes your work by scenes, which roll up into chapters; they're stored as rich text files, so you can get at them easily with other programs (a must for professionals, who are probably going to have to convert everything to MSWord for submission because that's what all the publishers use).

And I absolutely adore the analysis tools in yWriter. It lets you assign values to each scene for things like tension or romance - you get to pick - and then graphs them so you can see how different aspects of your plot are progressing. It can generate a schedule that shows what you've done, what stage each chapter or scene is at (outline, first draft, etc.), finished word count, days and words til deadline, what you still have to do,  target daily word count… It can analyze word usage so you can find out which words you've used too many times. And other stuff. (Why yes, my day job was as an analyst, and I really liked it. Why do you ask?)

The only thing that made me frown slightly was that I couldn't figure out how to make the work window go to full-screen mode, and I don't know whether that was me or the program. But the work screen was fairly large anyway, and it was easy enough to stretch it out manually…and when I did, I didn't cover up anything I wanted to see. Overall, I'd give it an A.

The last writing program I've been playing with a lot is Liquid Story Binder. It's a download-the-demo-for-30-days program, so you can try it out and then decide if you want to pay $45.95 for it. Of all the programs I've seen so far, it is well and away the most flexible. It's also the most complex, with a fairly steep learning curve. I've been messing around with it for a month, and barely scratched the surface of what I can make it do. It's the only writing program I've found that lets you make up a music playlist right there in the writing workspace, to be saved right along with everything else, for instance.

LSB is in many ways a kitchen sink program, and unlike most of the others, it's designed to be maximally flexible. For instance, instead of a "Characters" tab, where you are expected to enter specific information about each character (name, gender, birthday, description, etc.) and a "Locations" tab where you enter place names and descriptions, it has a "Lists" file type that has a "Characters" template and a "Places" template - and you can edit the templates to provide just the information you think you need, just the way you want to see it. It seems to me that it would be especially good for people who have lots of visual references - pictures, photos, and drawings - because several of the file types are obviously meant to store and organize graphics.

The down side is that all these options can get a bit overwhelming…and there's that learning curve. The key to using this one, I think, is realizing that I don't have to use every possible feature it has. (It will take months just for me to look at all of them, let alone figure out how they can all be useful.) I'm tempted to rate it A+…but I'm a little worried that playing around with all those options will actually get in the way of writing instead of being useful. So for now, it's a plain A.

Right now, these two (yWriter5 and Liquid Story Binder) and Scrivener are my top three contenders for replacing my current word-processor, and I think I'm going to have to play around with all of them for a while before I make a final decision. And, of course, look at whatever other options come up in the meantime.