Software To Make Your Writer’s Heart Beat Faster: Voodoo Pad

I’m not a software geek. I don’t like learning new programs (another reason to love the Mac since you learn one of them, you know most of them) and I really don’t need many applications anyway, certainly not a new one.

And then I found Voodoo Pad.

Voodoo Pad is personal wiki software, a program that lets you build a private wiki on your computer. It’s going to be good for about a thousand things, but right now what it’s good for is organizing the ten thousand pages of notes that Krissie, Lani, and I have accumulated building a world for the Fairy Tale Lies book.

You start with a New Document (you have a choice of Document or Page, Document is like a three ring binder and Page is, uh, a page in it). This new document will be the index for whatever it is you’re building a wiki for.

So let’s say you’re organizing a book. You title the index page with the title of your book, and then on that page you list Characters, Locations, whatever you want to keep track of in your notes. You select Characters, hit the Link button and a new page opens up that says Characters at the top, and on that page you list your characters. You select your heroine’s name, hit the Link button, and new page opens up with your heroine’s name on it. Type in your description, drop in photos or drawings or anything else you’re using as description. Then look to the left where all the page names are displayed alphabetically and click on Characters again. When you go back, the name of your heroine is now a link.

Now go back to your index page, select “Locations,” hit Link, and a new page called “Locations” opens up. List your locations. Select the location where your heroine lives, hit Link, and a new page opens up with the name of the heroine’s house on it. Type in a description and when you type your heroine’s name, it will automatically become a link back to her page. Then drop in pictures, maps, whatever. Keep doing this and you’ll have all your notes, images, descriptions, whatever in one multi-paged digital notebook with all your keywords linked to each other with a list of docs on the side.

The program does a lot more, but for right now, just the fact that I have a program that will organize the three million projects I have in pieces on my computer is enough to make me dizzy with happiness. I can use Voodoo to organize Argh posts if I decide to do a book because there’s no limit to the size of the pages; I can put whole chapters in there if I want. I can scoop up the ten million notes I have about that writing book I keep meaning do and finally get them organized and linked. I can put all my Writewell stuff into one doc. I can scan in all the cottage documents and organize them (the program will capture e-mail receipts and turn them into PDFs for you). It’s going to be fabulous for keeping the stuff for the five McDaniel courses organized. Oh, and it plays well with Dropbox so I can put the whole thing in there.

I love this software. And right now they’re offering a limited time price of $24.95 which is a steal if you’re a writer trying organize info for a book; you can download a trial version to see if you like it before you buy, although it’s a short trial. That’s all right; I was pretty much sold with the first link.

Voodoo Pad. I recommend it.

Edited to Add: For Macs only but search for “wiki software” and see what’s available for PCs, or try the Mac hacks Tom talks about in his comment below with the free Voodoo trial.

Also in answer to JulieB:

Scrivener and Voodoo have some overlap, but they have different purposes.

Scrivener, billed as “a complete writing studio,” is essentially novel-writing software although you can use it for many more things. For example, you can organize your scenes by numbering and naming them and putting brief notes on color-coded notecards on a bulletin board, each linked to a file that holds that entire scene, giving you a way to see your book at a glance by looking at the bulletin board or hitting the “outline” button or with a click just the scene you’re working on. There’s a window next to each scene that can hold pictures of characters, links to research, etc. It does a lot more than that with a lot more features than that, and it can be used for other kinds of projects, but its focus is on novel-writing.

Voodoo is wiki-building software. It’s designed to organize all the information for a project, linking all the elements together so that it becomes a wikipedia for that entity, which means it’s good for anything that has a lot of information that needs to be easily searchable: “VoodooPad is a place to write down your notes and thoughts. Ideas, images, lists, passwords, your mom’s apple pie recipe. Include anything you need to keep track of and organize, and VoodooPad will grow with you without getting in the way. Drag and drop folders, PDFs, applications, or URLs into VoodooPad, and they will link up just like on the web. And with powerful search, nothing will be lost or out of reach.” I use so many bits and pieces of different things that it’s a godsend for organizing all of my writing projects.

Just to make things more interesting, the other software I use a lot that overlaps with these (it’s in my dock) is Curio: “Curio is the digital notebook for freeform information gathering, brainstorming, and creative exploration. Curio allows you to effortlessly take notes, manage tasks, make photo collages, sketch with brushes & pens, and create beautifully styled lists, mind maps, tables, and index cards. All within the same amazingly intuitive integrated environment.” (I have the cheapest version because that does everything I need it to.)

There’s a lot of overlap among the three programs, but they each do the specific thing they were designed for so beautifully that it’s worth it to me to have all three.

Oh and as Julie mentioned in the comments, there’s an app for that (Voodoo).