fokios.blogg.se - Story planner for writers windows

#STORY PLANNER FOR WRITERS WINDOWS SOFTWARE#

And if the relationship changed, I'd have to edit both docs to express the new relationship. I'd have to add a link from each related doc to the other. Over time, I found that I could create the relationships I needed as "wiki" links from one Scrivener doc to another. You can't navigate it in both directions (uh, or in either direction). In my outline photo, you can see a simple relationship, but it's just a text field. This custom metadata feature doesn't let you easily add relationships from one character to another. You probably don't want custom character fields in your plot outline, and vice versa, so that might nudge you to keep characters in a separate project. You can put multiple paragraphs into the fields if you want, but I prefer subdocuments for that.įields appear in all docs. You can also view these fields in the outline: When you add a metadata field, it becomes available for all documents in the project. You can add fields by clicking the gear button. Here's a photo where I added a few fields: See the "Custom Meta-Data" button at the bottom of the inspector (it looks like a little tag).

You can do some custom fields in Scrivener. Unless I can find a better tool, such as a spreadsheet for text or a text editor with columns and rows, I will likely stick with it.Ĭustom Meta-Data in Scrivener. newlines within cells or alternating background adapting to newly added rows)ĭespite these drawbacks, I find using Excel to create characters very helpful.

limited or awkward styling and editing options (e.g.

the visual clutter that comes from this functionality.

the vast functionality that is unrelated to writing text into cells, which makes the program cumbersome to use for this purpose.

This question contains a (made-up) example of what this might look like: Outliner (software) with annotations for OS X or browser based (but offline!) For more detailed work on the character arcs, I switch to pen and paper and draw the kinds of graphs I have mentioned here: To visually and logically plan out stories I even partly develop character arcs in the spreadsheet. Colums can be added and moved around, too, which is nice if you want to see different characters side by side and work to make them more different or explore their relationship. For example, in some stories the outward appearance will be more important, so I will have rows for eye color, clothing style, and which part of their body hair they don't shave in other stories the past of the characters is more important so the backstory row will be split into many other rows such as kindergarten, relationship to siblings, or summer camp in 1963. For every story I write, I can create how many and whichever rows I need. In the spreadsheet, each column is a character and each row is some aspect of that character, such as traits (name, height, personality) and structural elements (development).

#STORY PLANNER FOR WRITERS WINDOWS SOFTWARE#

I use Excel, because I have it, but will try other speadsheet software before my next project. If you know of some software that does all that but has some other originally intended purpose, that's fine, too.Īfter some experimentation I have found that a spreadsheet works best for me. It does not have to be specialized software, but something with the above functionality. Persona: looks nice, but has these stupid character development tools that I don't need.character development from archetypes (as in Persona) or a list of mental disorders (as in Character Writer).these relations should not be limited in number.creating relations between characters (married to, boss of, lives next door to, etc.).it would be nice if it somehow interacted with my writing and timeline software (Scrivener and Aeon Timeline).adding images, text files, movies and stuff, or linking to these.

once created, these categories should automatically be available for each character.it should have or allow me to create categories like name, gender, age, backstory, and so on.something like a filesystem, with a file for each character.I'm looking for a software that helps me develop and organize the characters for my novel.