An Australian novelist and programmer, Simon Haynes, has put together the kind of software he needed for his own writing needs. You can find it at http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html and it is free.
I suspect it will also meet the needs of others who, like novelists, need to move text around and to keep track of facts and descriptions in what they are writing. I use an outliner, but have never been happy with the outliners built in to Word and OpenOffice. They just let you give an item a subheading and then open and close the subheads to add and edit the text under them. If you move a subheading then all the associated text moves with it, and is surprising how often an idea which you thought was best in one section or chapter needs to go somewhere else.
The advantage of Ywriter is that you can make separate notes of where you think your ideas are going. In use by a novelist this will include sections of facts about characters and places etc so that you do not change a character's eye colour or have them change venues impossibly fast. and installs quickly.
I don't think I'll ever write the great Australian novel. It's been said that inside every journalist is a novel and that with any luck that's where it will stay. But this could be useful in helping keep track for what I do write. I'll certainly be playing round with it a but more, and will also have to check the library for Simon's Hal Spacejock comedy scifi books -- there are four of them, distributed by Penguin.
The software will not replace your word processor, but it may help more than novelists in organising ideas into words before they make their way to the word processor, just as they then eventually make their way to a page layout program.
Comments