Writing software: Things to consider, Part 2

Continuing on:

3) Organizing notes and research

This category overlaps a bit with both the analysis and development categories, because a lot of the notes you want to organize are things that could/should come up during the development stage, and a lot of the aspects you might want to analyze also start as notes or research.

In this area, what I want in a program is flexibility. Some of the programs start with pre-set, hardcoded categories (Characters. Locations. Items.) that require specific inputs (Hair color and length. Height. Age.) – in other words, you have to organize your notes according to a specific system. The advantage is that you know where to find stuff when you need to look it up; the disadvantage is that you may not think the way the program system does, and your idea process may not fit the program. (One program wanted to know what each character has in his/her/its refrigerator. Only one of the characters in my current WIP has a refrigerator, and she can’t get at it after Chapter One.)

Consequently, I prefer to make up my own categories for things-I-need-to-remember, and I want a program that accommodates this – where I can rename the tabs or set up my own “tree” of things I need to know (Dangerous creatures. Non-dangerous magical creatures. Lies that everyone believes. Truths that no one believes. Good Ideas Not Appearing In This Book). This is, however, a bit of a nuisance, so if your basic notes usually fit some program’s pre-set system, you might as well save yourself the time. And it is lovely to have a place to put all the miscellaneous notions that one inevitably generates in the course of writing the story.

4) Manuscript analysis

For me, this was both the most useful and the most frustrating category, because the tools included in each program vary so much. Some require you to tag every scene with a huge lot of information (pov character, location, characters appearing, type of action, degree of tension, time of day, weather, links to other scenes, etc.), which I found a terrible nuisance and a big time sink, but once you do, the program will spit out all sorts of charts and diagrams that can be very useful for spotting that guy you sent out to get groceries in Chapter 10 and completely forgot about, or the subplot that got lost in the underbrush. Others focus more on tools like Readability (which measures reading level, a very useful thing if you’re writing Young Adult or children’s fiction) or the one that tells you which uncommon words you used the most (i.e., it doesn’t include “is” or “the”) or which phrases you’ve repeated how many times, so you can catch that you have had six different characters “hiss like an angry cat” twenty-five times in the course of the manuscript.

There were a couple of programs that had “critique” functions that purported to tell you if you were using clichés or committing too many adjectives/adverbs. They’re better than they used to be, but still not great, and they’re more likely to cause trouble than be useful, in my opinion, unless you can add your own phrases to the list.

A lot of the development and organizing capabilities overlap with this one (if you have developed 16 characters with the development part of the program, you might as well use that info to analyze their storylines, since the information is already right there in the software). There are also features like storyboarding and storyline/subplot diagrams that are hard to classify – for instance, some writers use storyboarding for development, some for analysis of a first draft, and some as part of their work flow, as an ongoing check to keep things on track.

Whether you want a lot of analysis tools or none will depend on what you want to know, how often you need to know it, what you find useful (as opposed to just fun), and whether you are subject to analysis paralysis.

The frustrating part for me is that there isn’t one program that has all the analysis tools I want all in the same place.

5) Submission formatting and tracking

I almost left this one off. The programs that expect you to actually write your novel in them (i.e., they have decent word processing) also mostly have decent compile-and-export-into-a-manuscript capability. A couple don’t allow you to specify the format of this output – they give you Courier New, double-spaced, with one-inch margins, and you’ll like it, or else – but the “final” files are usually rich text that can be edited in pretty much anything else to tidy them up.

Very few programs had anything explicitly intended to track submissions, and of the ones I saw, none of them were any more use than a basic Word file with the editor’s name, address, and date of submission. This is really inadequate for a professional writer. Also, the writing software segregates this information by manuscript (it’s part of the project file, not general information), which means you would have to go through a lot of manual comparisons to find out whether Editor A or Editor B had expressed more interest in/bought more of your work. What you really want is a purpose-built database or spreadsheet program that’s just for tracking submissions.

The main thing here is to be sure that whatever the program outputs as your final manuscript is in a format that an editor can read in MSWord. At least one of the things I looked at would only compile your manuscript into a proprietary electronic version; you had to print the thing out if you wanted to submit it to an editor. You also want to consider how much “tidying up” is going to be necessary; if you have to add chapter heads and a table of contents, or delete the automatic line spaces between bits of text that are supposed to read continuously, it can add up to a lot of work. It may be worth it to get the analysis or development features, but at least think about it.