![]() ![]() ![]() And if right now you need to focus on cranking out those 50,000 words, don’t forget that November 2015 will arrive before you know it. At any time, you can download a demo from the Storyist site. If what I’ve said interests you, this is the perfect time to explore: NaNoWriMo participants can get a 25% discount in November. But otherwise I produce my novels entirely in Storyist. At the moment, I still do a bit of final formatting in Scrivener, which lets me remove first-line indents from chapter and section opening paragraphs. Any revisions I make go back into the Storyist file, which in turn becomes the basis for the e-book versions. I stay in Storyist until the last minute, then export the RTF files to InDesign for final typesetting. At the end of each book, I save a template to preserve all that work for the next one. If a chapter seems flat, sheets show where the conflict died. I add fields to track characters’ internal and external goals. When I’ve painted my protagonist into a corner, I set up index cards to walk her out. But the options I do use, I use every day, and I like knowing the others are there if I need them. Full screen mode leaves me cold, and I tend to forget the collages exist until I stumble over them. My character and setting sheets remain half-filled, I have yet to produce a complete set of plot points, and it’s a rare book that contains more than a few section sheets. I don’t bother with every bell and whistle. In all these ways, Storyist helps me make good use of my time. If I need an overview of the story or a shorthand list of characters or settings, the outline view exists for that purpose-and I can export that, too, for distribution in Word. When I get farther into the story and want to read it as a book, I can export an ePub or Kindle file when I need to send chapters to my fellow writers, I save the manuscript as RTF when I get that great idea right after I’ve shut down my computer, I type it into the iPad app and sync it back to Dropbox. (Did I overuse “gadget”? I can find out in a flash.) For calculating distances or sketching out a story, saving that great page I found on the Internet or reusing information from a previous book, Storyist is invaluable. ![]() I can search the entire project for facts, words, or phrases. When I can’t remember the color of a character’s eyes or how old that person is in this book, I click into the appropriate sheet, then back to my manuscript, without losing minutes or hours. Everything in moderation, as they say.īut the upside is huge. And just as it’s possible to workshop a novel to death, you can spend so much time plotting and constructing timelines, defining character traits, and collecting data that you forget to write the story. ![]() It costs money (although less than some word processors). Learning a new program takes time you could have spent writing. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that multiple options have their downside. I can get rid of windows, stack them on top of each other instead of side by side, or go into full screen mode and show only the manuscript. On the left sits the usual list of folders, expanded to show different sets of information. On the right I’ve displayed the novel’s main settings in outline mode, the third available option (besides text and grid-that is, index cards or photographs). I can show and hide these fields as I like. It includes fields that came with the program (age, gender, eye color, hair color, build), fields that I defined (patronymic, character type, emotional makeup), my image of the character, and moments in her development-her character arc-linked to scenes in the story where that development takes place. So far, I have only about ten pages of text, which is sure to change as I write, so instead I’m showing the individual character sheet for Nasan, the heroine. The third screen shot comes from The Swan Princess, the book I started this summer. ![]()
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