As you might reasonably expect, on the occasions when I meet a fellow author we almost inevitably end up talking about writing. That shouldn’t come as very much of a surprise because authors, like people involved in any trade, usually take a keen interest in how other people approach their work. One author I met some time ago worked in an entirely different way to the method that I use. He had the patience and the ability to work out an enormously detailed synopsis for each book, a synopsis that might approach one third of the length of the finished manuscript, and then he basically wrote the book exactly following that synopsis.
One of the things I like least about writing is doing a synopsis, even a one-page effort, and I simply wouldn’t have the patience to work the way he did. I tend to start with an idea and a blank page in Word. I think of a decent opening sentence – or I try to – and then go on from there. I always know more or less how the book is going to end, but I very rarely have any idea of the twists and turns which the plot will take during the writing, and for me this system works. Neither of us was right or wrong. Like all authors we work the way that seems to suit us best.
But occasionally I have stopped and wondered if some form of specialist software might help me to organize my thoughts rather better than simply trying to keep the entire plot and all the characters tucked away in various compartments of my unreliable brain. So some time ago I decided to try a program called Storybook Pro. I played around with the free version for a while and then decided to buy the ‘Pro’ version and see how that worked.
On the face of it, that should have been a remarkably useful program for any writer because it offered the ability to create major and minor characters, describe locations and all the rest of it, inspect the timeline and use various charts and other tools. In reality, and in use, it was precisely the opposite. The program was non-intuitive in many respects, and the parameters were so rigid that it actually acted as a dampener on creativity. I doubt if any working author had had any input into the design of the program at any stage.
For example, in most of my books I begin with a prologue, normally set many years, sometimes many centuries, before the action which takes place in the present day. Storybook Pro simply wouldn’t let me do that, because it insisted on a precise date for each section, and it also wouldn’t allow me to call the first chapter ‘Prologue’. In fact, I did eventually find a way around this, but it took me the better part of half an hour to do so. The dating system was particularly rigid. You either had to insert a specific date or use what it called ‘relative dating’, where a particular section occurred a number of days after the previous one. It was so much easier in Word to just type the date I wanted – rather than the date the program wanted – at the head of the chapter.
As well as chapters, there were also ‘strands’ and ‘parts’, neither of which seem to be particularly useful for any purpose I could discern. The program was also irritating in that various icons on the screen didn’t do anything – for example, at the beginning of each chapter was either the word ‘draft’ or ‘outline’, each followed by a different icon which logically you would expect to allow you to switch views. They didn’t. Neither the name nor the icon did anything at all, which rather made me wonder why they were there in the first place.
Other niggles with it were that it was incredibly slow to load, so slow, in fact, that usually I ended up clicking the icon again, when it would generate an error message telling me that the file was already in use. Word is a big program, but it loaded in less than half the time that Storybook Pro took to appear. It was even clumsy when you left it. Clicking the close button didn’t close the program but generated a dialogue box which asked if you wanted to close the program. Oddly enough, that was why I had clicked the close button, but the program – or more accurately the programmer – appeared to be too stupid to realize this.
But perhaps my biggest concern with this program was that shortly after I had purchased version 3.2, the company sent me an e-mail that explained how much better version 4.0 was, and how much less rigid the parameters were, and offered me a substantial discount off the purchase price of the new program. The idea was that existing users could input a code during the purchase process, and the price would then be adjusted accordingly. So I tried this. In fact, I tried it about a dozen times, and it simply didn’t work. I e-mailed the company. I actually e-mailed them six times pointing this out and asking if they could fix it. I never had a response to any of my messages.
The most sensible choice of action seemed to me to give up, so that’s what I did. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Storybook Pro is no longer available to purchase unless you can find an old copy on one of the auction sites. And if you do, that’s where I’d leave it.
I’ve tried other specialist software since then, and the only one I’ve ever found of even the slightest use is a cheap and cheerful program called Write Your Own Novel, but even that doesn’t work as well for me as Word, so I’ll just stick with what I know.
