Hitting the Books

I’m forever seeking a more efficient way to keep my stories organized. I have this multigenerational family I’ve created, with somewhere upward of a 100 people, and I have stories for most of them already. Needless to say, keeping that many people organized is a pain. Keeping that many stories organized is almost as bad, especially when I’m actually writing.

WriteWay claimed to do just what I needed–organize my characters, keep my plots straight, and generally make my writing easier. I was a bit skeptical, so I downloaded the free 30-day trial, and played around with it.

Let’s just say I was underimpressed.

• First off, I found WriteWay a clutzy program to use. I spent half my time looking for functions and tabs.
• Another big complaint is the set-up for characters. The program didn’t allow my to work on my story when a character notecard was open, so I was continually clicking between the two functions. And the templates were annoying to work with.
• The book outline available to the left of the notecards was nothing amazing either. Sure, it divided up the story into acts, chapters, and scenes. I can do the same thing using the Document Map in Microsoft Word.
• The “notecards” are WriteWay’s big thing. There are notecards for Plot, Conflict, Characters (different from the Character database), Scene Sketch, Setting, Dialogue, Romance, Suspense, Subplot, and Revision. These are supposed to help guide the writer and keep all the information in one place. I found them repetitive, and it was quite annoying to click through all the tabs trying to remember where I put that one piece of information–was it on the Setting card, or the Scene sketch? Or perhaps I jotted it down in my Revision notes?
• Even the vaunted Storyboard, where a writer can move scenes around to help the flow of the story, wasn’t particularly useful to me.

Most of the things WriteWay claims to simplify work just as well with Word and good old-fashioned printouts.
• Using Excel, I can set up a database of characters, then merge them into a Word template and print them out. That way I can keep my character sheets right there within reach and not worry about opening and closing programs.
• Cutting and pasting and using the Document Map as a guide works just fine for me–no fancy storyboard needed.
• If I really needed a storyboard, PowerPoint slides have the same capability. I can even import my outline from Word directly into PowerPoint, then move the slides around, just like with WriteWay.
• If I need maps or articles I can put them in (omigosh!) a file in a filing cabinet, and not muck around with scanning (or worse, typing) them into a computer. I do scan character and setting pictures, then plug them directly into my story so I see them every time I go to write, but I didn’t see any way to do the same thing in WriteWay.

In the end, I was so bored/fed-up with the program that I didn’t even bother to finish out the demo period before uninstalling it.

Perhaps there is a different program out there that does all the things I want it to do, but after looking through the options at download.com, I’m not very hopeful. They all sound the same. Sigh. I guess I’ll just stick to my tried-and-true methods for now, until the next Big Thing comes along.

Though if anyone knows of a program to help organize a whole world, I’d love to hear about it–keeping a fantasy world nicely organized is a real trick (I’ll have to post sometime on the perils of creating your own little world, how easy it is to disappear into the creation and forget about the writing)