Some new toys for writing
The eighth Nic Costa book is now done. So I’m thinking about the ninth. I have a location, a rough idea of the story, and perhaps even a title. Most of the research is done too, so now I am standing on the edge of the cliff waiting to leap. And, as always in these situations, wondering which particular vehicle to take for the journey.
The last two books have been written in Scrivener, which is an excellent piece of software, great value at $39.95, and one I heartily recommend if you have a Mac. It’s perfect for the mosaic way I work, seeing a book as a collection of chapters and scenes, not as a single lump of text. Will I use it for book nine? Probably, but there are a couple of interesting contenders on the horizon for Mac users, Storyist ($59) and the $49.95 Storymill. How do they stack up?
Scrivener is pretty powerful competition it has to be said. Once you get the hang of the thing it can do pretty much everything any writer would want to do - and more. A lot more. Maybe too much more. Even after two years of working with it I still only scratch the surface of the thing and I’m sure there are a lot of powerful features I just haven’t missed. It is a very rich - in other words complex - piece of software once you begin to play with it. Not that I’m worried too much about that these days. I long ago learned to pick up the piece I needed and ignore the rest. But the complexity is still there, which I suspect puts off some newcomers. And let me be honest. I spend a lot of time inside my chosen word processor. Sometimes it’s just a good idea to take a break and try something new for a change.
First up I tried Storymill. This is based upon an older writers’ word processor called Avenir, with a few added tweaks. It’s a straightforward piece of work and you can download a copy of Treasure Island adapted for it to see how everything hangs together. A left hand pane handles the structure of the book, chapters, characters, scenes, locations and research for example.
It’s all pretty logical stuff. You can attach a status to sections to note when they’re finished or in final draft. You can drag in images and research for future reference, as you can with Scrivener and Storyist too. The one obvious unique feature is a timeline graph which allows you to check the visual progress of a story, hour by hour or day by day, based on times set for each scene. You can see it below. Not the kind of thing I’d use to be honest so I don’t have much of a useful opinion about it.
A couple of things baffled me. I don’t really understand why the scenes section works independent of chapters, the chronological order of the book. Scenes appear in both locations and for the life of me I can’t see why - it just confuses me. Also I fail to understand why it’s impossible to get a scene word count easily, while chapter word counts appear automatically in the status bar. I asked the tech support people about this and got the question: why would I want a scene word count? Why wouldn’t I? Scrivener shows me scene, chapter, act and manuscript word counts dead easily. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be. Oh, and one thing I hated. This does the full screen writing trick which I hated until Scrivener came along. But Scrivener does it brilliantly, throwing a perfectly formatted scene onto a black background, fading out everything else, but leaving your scene notes on one side if you need them. Storymill does it the way most full screen writing apps do it. You’re back in the world of MS-DOS, with bare text against a bare background, one that is far too wide to read on any modern screen of any size. Still, it’s worth a look, and will doubtless progress with time.
Storyist is, I think, more promising though. If you look at the screenshot below (which can be magnified) you’ll see that it follows the general outline of most apps of this sort.
You have a structure on the left, with areas for characters, plot points and threads, locations, research and notes. You can get scene word counts, though in the current version you have to add them manually. There’s a storyboard that will let you see all the different elements in outline or corkboard view. To me it feels cleaner and less fiddly than Storymill, though that’s doubtless a personal thing (all these programs have free trial downloads so I suggest you give them a try yourself). For someone who wants to plot out a book in detail, Storyist has some really strong tools. In fact, while I only half outline most books, I am tempted to try to do a full outline in Storyist for once because it looks so easy and inviting. We’ll see.
A few things confuse me. The section sheets are effectively flip pages of scenes and are created whenever you create one of those. The way they look when you first see them made me think they were somehow separate. Again you can make this (to me) more logical by fiddling with the program but it is a little work, and the changes - essentially hiding the section elements and putting them in the storyboard pane - don’t seem to stick from edit to edit. You can also do clever stuff with wiki style editing, linking to different parts of the document. I suspect this would be really useful but I haven’t quite got the hang of it yet.
There are, for me, a few omissions too. No easy way to annotate directly into text. No chapter numbering. No way to pull out a scene and open it in a window of its own to work just on that (only Storymill of these three apps understands the ‘open in new window’ idea which strikes me as odd). The full screen option would be something I’d like too so long as it was done in a decent way, not one that pushed me back into the era of MS-DOS.
Storyist has started to grow on me the more I use it. I’ll be spending the first ten days of September on the road in South Africa and plan to take it along to see how well I can try to map out the new book using it. I could, of course, do all this in Scrivener if I wanted too, and perhaps I will. We’ll see. More later when I feel I’ve reached some kind of conclusion.
