Ever thought of using Excel or Microsoft Project to outline your novel? How about voice recognition software? Read how authors are making technology work for them in this NYT essay. Novelist Richard Power wins the geek prize:
For the past decade, Powers has turned to a program rather ominously called Mindjet MindManager, which creates vast, sprawling outlines resembling family trees. (Imagine a sports playoff bracket, but with sub-branches listing biographical data for each player, and ways to search by jersey color.)
For “The Echo Maker,” which won the National Book Award last year and is about a man who emerges from a coma without an emotional connection to his intimates, Powers created a visual outline for each character. It included material on his or her “life history, personality traits, physical characteristics, verbal tics, professional and educational background, choices and actions, attitudes and relations to the other characters,” he said. “As the material grew, I created topical sub-branches and sub-sub-branches. … After many months, at the very tips of these increasingly articulated branches, I sometimes ended up with sketches that plugged right into the draft.”
Powers also poured the background research into hyperlinked notebooks using Microsoft OneNote, a program more commonly used by businesses, which allows you to combine text documents, e-mail, images, spreadsheets and video and audio material into one searchable document. He then mapped out possible changing interactions between characters. “These notebook sections gradually grew into the kernels of individual dramatic scenes, which I could then work up in parallel,” Powers said. “The combination of software programs (each of which links seamlessly into the other) allowed for simultaneous top-down and bottom-up composition.”
I’ve been looking into various possible software solutions to organizing the complexities of novel writing. The key to this search in my mind is finding a tool that enhances rather than distracts from the actual work of writing. I’ve been intrigued by YWriter. It’s free software designed specifically for writing novels by a guy who actually writes novels, Simon Haynes. Haven’t tried it yet, but it looks to be worth checking out.
http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html
I love this topic, but Powers’s approach blows me away. I do have print to voice software which is fun–having the computer read your text back to you–but haven’t used outlining aids yet. I recently loaded Final Draft for screenwriting purposes and have begun using it also to outline stories (using its notecard function that allows you to easily reorganize scenes), but I’m not sure if that will work well for a novel.
A friend of mine uses something she really likes on her Mac — if she reads this I hope she’ll post the name of the software.
Something like this would only work for me if it could read my dreams as I sleep. That’s when the characters and plot get depth for me.
I have, however, scrawled trees of information on paper with what I’m currently writing. It’s a method I learned from reading a book years ago. I believe it was titled “How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci.”
[...] 11th, 2007 · No Comments Just wanted to call your attention to a comment on one of my previous posts. Matthew Lowes points us to yWriter, whose author in turn recommends [...]
Jer’s Novel Writer. Free download.
http://www.jerssoftwarehut.com
That’s the one. Thanks.
I’ve got it downloaded–now if only I could figure out how to use it!
[...] copy of the article on my screen, complete with correct citation. Right-click, send to OneNote (an all-purpose information database tool), and the article I so coveted is [...]