Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Story writing software

By chance, do any of you have recommendations on story writing software? Someone recommended Story Master Pro to me, so I may go with that, but I thought I'd ask on the off-chance someone here has some that they swear by. Thanks.

I've never really looked into it, Charles. I'm a little old skool and scribble everything in notebooks.

I take random notes (not a ton, but some), and SOMETIMES I actually type them into files on my computer, but usually I misplace them. Of course, more often than that I never even write down the idea. This could be helped a lot by always carrying around a notepad, but beyond that, I think the software would help me bring it all together and actually shape a story that much easier. At least, that's the hope.

I bought a little pocket sized notepad that I carry around with me now. A lot of ideas come while stuck in traffic.

I just played with it for 10 minutes. Not bad. I still prefer Power Stucture, but the latter is now too old and is a bit fragile. But this one gives a pretty nice "quick view" of the flow.

I saw Power Structure around when doing some searches. It's too bad if they haven't kept it up-to-date. What do you like about it?

Three main things:
1) Independance of plot points form the structure itself so you can build sequences and merge them with the other story lines in the views that are more sequence-oriented.
2) The "six-line" of virtual cards that can help following the flow of paralel story lines
3) User interface is pretty intuitive (compared to the one you mentionned to open this thread).

I think they could have done a much, MUCH better job with the virtual cards (even if it is useful as it is right now). I never used the "conflicts" sub-system, but it looked well done.

Now (even if I don't write much these days because of work demands) I simply use Excel or Word and color-coded tables to plan the flow. For the rest, after 7 novels, you end up needing less and less tools.

If I can even get through one novel, I'll be pretty impressed with myself. I'm sure I'll need all of the help I can get to finish that one. By the way, did you try any other software before settling on Power Structure?

Any experience with yWriter? Its features are limited, but maybe it's all I really need, and it's free. I suppose the best thing to do is try it all myself and see what suits me the best.

This one looks better than the first one. Sometimes the issue with free soft is scalability (large projects and stuff). But I may actually try this yWriter for a real project.
Thanks.

I tried a lot of software before Power Structure and PS was the only one to remotely interest me. Speaking of tools, I wrote my first novel on paper as I did not have access to a computer at home a the time. Pen and paper is still a pretty good tool! I used Power Structure for 2 projects only.

EDIT: The yWriter comes with a very easy way to edit and see the states of each scenes (which is VERY useful when in "production" mode) and plan for size and view "active" "reactive" flow. I like that.

The little bit of clicking around I did in yWriter looked promising. I think I'll go ahead and use it and see what happens. I'm kind of excited about writing a story I've planned instead of trying to wing it.