For instance, many published novelists plot out their stories in advance, writing plot points onto 3 x 5 note cards, then pinning those cards onto a board on the wall. The typewriter is the manuscript, either a story or a screenplay/script, and there are other tools to help you out. Storyist 2.0 seems to me to be the consummate writer's desk from the days of typewriters, all condensed down to one piece of elegantly crafted software. That's enough about NaNoWriMo, but I'll refer to it as I write the remainder of this review of Storyist. Once you've had that first experience of proving to yourself that you can indeed generate a lot of words and dialogue, the next goal is to think about writing a more complete story within the 50,000 word box, or at least knowing where your story is going so that you can complete it after NaNoWriMo ends. For first-time NaNoWriMo participants, something like WriteRoom is perfect, as you're not really worrying so much about writing something readable as much as you are just getting that daily quota of words chugged out. The novel was actually only at about the one-third point in terms of telling the story when it came to its premature 50,000 word limit.Īs I've mentioned in other reviews of writing tools, there are some tools like WriteRoom that excel in letting you simply get words out of your brain and into the computer. The other thing that I learned is that although my imagination was able to come up with a plausible plot line, engaging characters, and interesting settings, I needed to organize the flow of my writing. My novel wasn't by any means complete, and it certainly wasn't publishable, but I had proven to myself that I could wedge the joy of writing fiction into my daily life. I was a "winner" in my first NaNoWriMo last year, which meant that I actually wrote more than 50,000 words (about 1,670 words per day average). They created an annual event in which budding writers can participate in writing a 50,000 word novella during the month of November. The creators of NaNoWriMo realized that the only thing that keeps many people from reaching their personal goal of writing a publishable novel is just sitting down and actually putting words on the virtual paper of our computer screens. Last November, I participated for the first time in National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. My reason for looking at all of these writing applications for the Mac is not just to write a lot of reviews, but to actually find a tool that can help me in my personal dream to become a novelist. Storyist can also be used for this method of writing, so I found it to be more useful to me after learning how to navigate its many features. I prefer to jump in and start writing, but want a way to capture important information about characters, settings, and plot points so I can refer to them later. Every writer has his or her own particular style of writing, and I find that pre-planning the writing process just doesn't work very well for me. The reason it took me so long to write the review is that Storyist works differently from my brain, and it took me a while to get used to it as a tool. I started testing this application a while back, and actually had a lot of my review written before it became stale and disappeared from our queue of posts. This application is very complete, with capabilities for completely planning out a story before writing it, as well as managing the writing process while the story is under construction. One of those tools is the recently updated Storyist 2.0 (US$59 as a download, or US$29 upgrade from a previous version) from Storyist Software. While a few of the tools that have been covered in depth have been minimalist writing environments such as WriteRoom, there are more powerful and complete writer's tools that are available for Mac users. Over the past several months, we've been publishing a series of reviews of writer's tools (last year we posted some great writing tools for students).
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