Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)StoryMill is novel-writing software for Mac OS X, specifically 10.4 or 10.5. Mariner Software says that StoryMill helps novelists outline, write, and publish novels. How? By tracking, tagging, and filtering characters, scenes, locations, research, and submissions.
There are also for counting word frequency, metering your daily writing goal, finding clichés, annotating your text, inserting photographs into annotations, bookmarking any part of the text, tracking submissions to agents or publishers, and storing research data. Smart views can search tags and prepare lists, like male characters or rural settings. Full screen allows you type on a blank screen that fills the entire computer screen, but switching fonts requires switching views and selecting Text - Font from the menu bar. You can select the color of the Full Screen and the font under preferences, and you may show or hide the ruler.
The main project window has four panels. The left column provides the source list and sublists of chapters, scenes, characters, locations, tasks, and research. The central column has a top panel that shows what is in a source clicked on the left; selection of an item on the source list shows the text of that item in the text field below the item list (much like an email list with the selected email message in the panel below). The third, right panel provides "metadata," which is basically the status information for the selection in the central panels (like 1st draft or incomplete). Scene view is required to see the date you started working on the selection, file location, storyline position shown as metadata.
Mariner calls the basis of this software a "dynamic outline," although a technical representative said that outline is just a metaphor; it definitely is not visible to the user. Furthermore, the software does not generate outlines of scenes, chapters, or storyline.
Using the software requires reading the User Guide or watching the online tutorials. I found both necessary to access the full range of functions and in order to comprehend the vocabulary and features unique to Mariner. The basics are simple, once explained. To add a new chapter or scene or research note, you "insert" a blank document into the item list in the upper central panel, name the document in the right panel (metadata column), and then type, paste, or import the text in the lower central panel or the Full Screen. To delete a document, you highlight it and select "remove."
The "scene" is the basic organizing principle, and multiple scenes make up a chapter, the idea being that the narrative flows from scene to scene within each chapter. This may work for an action story with many changing scenes, and the software allows skipping scenes and merely drafting chapters for storylines not requiring multiple scenes, but some search functions require the scene-level text. Of course, the writer might write a chapter as a "scene." Chapters and scenes can be rearranged by merely highlighting the item in the central item list and dragging it to the new location.
The software enables you to read a scene in the order it appears in your narrative or in the chronological order of a timeline, useful if your storytelling bounces around in time, albeit only the micro-time of weeks, days, hours, and minutes; stories that cover months or years are beyond the timeline capabilities. The timeline views may be useful for a novel like Six Days of the Condor, but not for a historical novel or even following a single character through years.
There is no feature to allow posting a note at the foot of a page or end of a chapter, thus preventing the author or an imaginary editor from having a voice separate from the narrator?s.
What would be a book folder in any standard word processing program is a project in StoryMill. Basically, this software forces an organization upon the writer presetting the source document types. It also eliminates the cutting and pasting to move text (whether in units called scenes or chapters), and it offers search capabilities with multiple variables. Furthermore, StoryMill can export different pieces as a single document, chapter text, names, scenes, selected chapters, text with or without annotative notes. It can export in different formats, but only as recent as Word 2007, yet also Word 97, HTML, PDF, rich text, and plain text.
At this stage in development, I recommend using a standard word processing software rather than StoryMill. It is the writer's job to write, not to modify a story to fit the limitations of a software or to write around the software. Moreover, learning this software takes time from writing, without sufficient benefits to compensate for the time lost.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Storymill
0 comments:
Post a Comment