My characters are running away with my novel!

October 17, 2006 9:54 PM

Please help me find something to organize this monstrosity of a novel. Oh yes, there is definitely

So I've been doing this Nanowrimo thing for 2 years. This will be year 3. I have a crazy cast of characters, and no actual plot line (aside from a very general idea) to speak of. What I am looking for is some type of free (preferable)/student discounted/super cheap software or internet thingy that will help me track what my characters are doing/what I want them to do. Sort of like putting notecards on a posterboard with lines going horizontally from each of the characters.

Basically, I would like to/need to have some sense of continuity in this novel that started out as a drunken joke. Plus, I'm starting to confuse myself when re-reading it.

Thanks, Mefi.

ps: Windows XP. I dig Word.

posted by sperose to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but I love YWriter for organizing my writings.
posted by Willie0248 at 10:00 PM on October 17, 2006

ywriter seems to be your best bet.

I personally dont use it because I am not one to overly plan my writing.

Else the nanowrimo forums (amongst all the schmalz) does have some good recommendations on websites and some other programs to help you plot things out.
posted by TheOtherGuy at 10:04 PM on October 17, 2006

Hot damn. YWriter seems to be exactly what I'm looking for.

You guys are fast. (And are both best answer.)



If anyone else has anything to add, don't be afraid to speak up. :)
posted by sperose at 10:18 PM on October 17, 2006

Not to derail, but to perhaps help future folks who might need it, if anyone has any mac related novel writing resources, I'd love to hear about them.
posted by willmize at 6:26 AM on October 18, 2006

I sometimes use Labyrinth for such purposes. Lots of different ways to look at the data you input, including one that looks along the lines of what you're after.

It does require installing .NET Framework, though. (For willmize's benefit, there is a link on the Labyrinth download page to an alternative to .NET that can run on most platforms.)

(yWriter looks cool, though! I think I'm going to have to give that one a try.)
posted by alyxstarr at 6:52 AM on October 18, 2006

StoryRight is an online version of what you seek. I think it has more use for character development than plot outlining, but I could see where others might feel differently.
posted by gnomeloaf at 7:53 AM on October 18, 2006

Just another vote for yWriter. I've used it to great success at writing my very own first novel. It does have some downsides, such as not being able to do pretty formatting (if you care about such things). So if you are writing dialogue and want to italicize something for emphasis, no dice.

However, I am totally addicted to that green bar thingy that indicates how much of your daily goal you have written.
posted by eurasian at 12:13 PM on October 18, 2006

A little late for the Nano crowd, but perhaps next year (when the application will be out of beta anyway). A Mac application for writers that I have been really happy with (and beta testing for a long time), is Scrivener. Check out the forums for the latest beta to download, and don't let the pre-release status scare you too much. It is beta, but I've only had a few crashes since it came out early this summer, and none of them resulted in data loss. As far as betas go, it is more stable, bug free, and well featured than most version 1 applications out there.

Re: Organisation. It has a pretty good mix of features for book writing. For example, it is easy to break apart a chapter by scenes for easy re-structuring, and then temporarily "stitch" them back together as if it were one document for editing. The whole book can be thus stitched and then disbanded back to an organised tree structure. I've never worked with anything that so easily handled the problem of temporarily combining parts of the narrative like that. Great for checking continuity and such. Sections can be viewed in a table so you can quickly see their draft status, word counts, and so on -- or as a corkboard with index cards (which, I admit, sounds like one of those cheesy things from the late nineties, but really it isn't!)

Something I really care about is that while it is a fully functional rich text editor, it also has built-in support for exporting MultiMarkdown documents to several formats, and dozens of LaTeX classes. If you know your way around XSLT, you could create custom exporters.
posted by AmberV at 3:44 PM on November 23, 2006

You might want to check out WriteItNow (PC or Mac). It is reasonably priced compared to other novel writing software - it also got a good review in Writers' Digest this year.
posted by FH3 at 7:05 AM on December 22, 2006

huh. I am on my 13th published book and I have never used anything more technical than Word.

I know it's low-tech but I use index cards. Most pubbed writers I know do, too. I think it's easy to get caught up in the filling up files of ideas and never get much writing done. I don't know if I would want to spill it all out on that anyway--once it's out there, it's just never as interesting to me. Too much pre-writing and organizing just seems to suck the life out the story.

I write fast and hard (two books a year at least) and I don't like too many distractions.
posted by writergurl at 3:14 PM on January 22, 2007