I can no longer stand to have material in multiple locations and formats so am searching for a good software solution. I use Journler for general note taking and research, but would like something that will let me track characters and themes across chapters.
My search has led to me Scrivener (the front runner, for its features) or StoryMill (made by the author of Journler, so it has historical currency). Does anyone have experience with either of these programs?
advTHANKSance
(If you have any suggestions that you think are better than these programs, note that it must run native in OS X.)
The biggest draw for me is that I can have what I see on the screen look one way, but when I export it it’s in manuscript format. Being able to take snapshots is nice too.
I also like how works in binder view. Each scene is it’s own text doc in Scrivener and I can move them around as I want. Plus, I can story board it, and having an area for research and notes is good too. The full screen view is awesome too, but I don’t use it much.
I’ve never used Scrivener, but after a lot of research it seems to be the one reason I’d end up getting a Mac. Everything I’ve used on the PC has been frustrating and disappointing.
Pardon me if I rant for a moment:
I’ve tried a lot of software over the last few years, and it’s all ended up being broken, poorly designed, half finished, or unsupported. Most of it has been some combination of the above. Poorly implemented features are okay if you’re downloading a utility. But they’re unacceptable when it’s going to be a tool I’m interacting with every day. Also, and I don’t get this, everyone thinks their software needs to have some kind of philosophical slant on coming up with ideas for your story. And then there’s always some weird half-assed toolset which is supposed to let you implement the Hero’s Journey somehow, but manages to bloat the software in a way that breaks the poorly implemented note-card system even further.
DO NOT WANT.
Ultimately I’ve ended up using a combination of FreeMind, TiddlyWiki, and Word.
I have scrivener, but surprisingly, I rarely use it. Still stick to a couple of notebooks, note cards, a corkboard and surprisingly, a program called Omnigraff, which builds flowcharts I use for plot points and character points. If anything, I use google sites with my collaborators to track information, the wiki nature of it, combined with the ability to link to google docs make it a great repository for notes writing that needs to be shared.
I keep hearing Scrivener’s awesome though, so I might give it a whirl alongside you.
Just wanted to thank you guys for the scrivener recommendation. I love writing, always used plain old Word for plain prose, and this program seems pretty amazing from what I see in the tutorial. Now I just need to get some self-discipline and get back into the writing itself.
Just curious: what types of writing are you folks doing? I have a few short fiction sales under my belt, but I’ve never used anything other than Word. Are you working on novels, scripts, shorts or something else?
I do anything non-school or graphics related in it. So, novels, short stories, and scripts go into Scrivener.
Anything school related I do in Apple’s Pages and export to a .doc format.
Scrivener doesn’t concern itself with formatting too much until you dump the draft out of it. So, for school when I tend to format assignments as I go, I use pages.
Weird to see this, as I’ve recently bought Liquid Story Binder XE. It’s PC-only, so it won’t suit the needs of the OP.
Cons: Its non-standard UI, half-assed file linking mechanism, daft colour schemes and counter-intuitiveness. It’s also trying to be all things to all men and a bit of focus wouldn’t go amiss.
Pros: There’s something potentially good here for assisting with outlining, annotating and viewing a large piece of work in discrete chunks (which is something I suppose all of these offer).
It’s also great for making me feel like I’m writing, while I’m not actually writing at all. The next step is to get a feature list together and write a .NET version of the tool that I want to use. That would pretty much guarantee I do no writing this year.
I wrote screenplays for years and because that kind of work is all structure with very little prose, I got by with Word and 4X5 index cards on a corkboard. Now I’m trying to piece together a novel and find I need to work spatially. Rather than starting at word 1, line 1, page 1, I write like filling in a crossword puzzle: this bit here and that bit over there and its all over the map and I need a system to keep track of themes and characters and subplots. Scrivener has that awesome Label and Keywords system that will let me track whatever I need to. For example: this program will compile and let me read all the scenes I’ve written that are flagged with this character, no matter where they appear in the manu. That’s pretty amazing. Plus, by breaking sections down into scenes this program will let me move things around with very little pain.
I wrote a few screenplays with Final Draft but I never loved the software itself (was glad to see that a Scrivener update later this year will add Final Draft support - here’s hoping I can write in Scrivener, then easily get it to Final Draft for formatting on the miracle I ever sold anything).
I want to get back into short stories and maybe someday tackle the beast that is a novel, and I loved how you could drag your research into Scrivener. Sometimes when I write and have research, I keep a stack of print outs on the table to reference as I write. Now I can have the writing and the research open in the same program.
I use Scrivener to organise my software ideas. It’s the main program which drove me to the Mac, besides iPhone development.
It doesn’t enforce novel-writing styles or anything like that - it just lets you organise text in categories as you see fit, with sidebars for notes/pictures/research. You could have one project for each book/program you’re writing, but I have one giant Scrivener project for just software planning.
I swear I saw a screenshot of Scrivener with Wikipedia loaded in the top pane and the text editor loaded in the bottom pane, but I can’t find it now. Is this possible (actively using the Web in a pane while writing in another), or do you only have access to static pages you’ve copied into a research folder?
So many people seem to write screenplays. Is there much hope for anyone not established or without connections? Do these things even get read? I visualize huge slush piles of unsolicited manuscripts that get tossed into landfills without ever being more than glanced at.
Just curious. Anyone know about what happens on the other end of these screenplays? Gordon?
They’re put into a huge pile where they’re eventually glanced at by a junior person who then share the worst ones with their friends who openly mock them.
At least that was my experience of hanging out with PAs in LA.
Some of them are legendarily bad. I was shown one called “Big Yellow Mama.” It was a musical about an electric chair, and I’ve never forgotten it.
I wrote one screenplay back in the day, but it was a miserable experience, and the realization that even if you succeed it’s only the very beginning of the process, made me realize my time was better spent writing other things.
