Will an app help you?

Can story software help you map out your novel?  Let’s find out.

Many years ago, when I was still writing for television, I tried out story planning software aimed at screenwriters.  It was okay but I never really got on with it and returned to the old-skool pen and A4 pad of paper.  Have things advanced since then?  Can software help me now?  I’ve decided to have another go and I’ve downloaded the Story Planner App from Apple’s App Store.  I should point out that it was an almost random choice from the many options available and I’ve paid for it myself.  There are no affiliate links below!

What I remember from using planning software first time around is that it often takes the form of what looks a bit like an online questionnaire.  In the ‘Character Builder’ section, for example, you’d have to fill in a series of questions such as ‘What is your character’s proudest achievement?’, ‘What is their greatest weakness?’ and so on.  I suspect that this kind of approach is still widely used by a lot of the software on offer.

Story Planner, on the other hand, is more to do with plot and structure than character details and requires that you know a lot of the basics already.  You start the process by creating a new project.  From there you can move onto a number of different input pages: Characters, Locations, Plots, Scenes and Notes.  In this sense, it’s closer to a notebook that has already been organised into categories for you but which is both flexible and editable in a way that a physical notebook clearly wouldn’t be.

To look at one example, the Characters page enables you to name each member of your cast, obviously, and attach the function that they will carry out.  Along with name, age and physical description, there are also boxes for their inner goal and their outer goal as well as their psychological make-up.  This is all well and good but it’s important to note that the software isn’t going to help you to construct any of this – it will only record what you’ve already decided under each heading.  In other words, it will prompt you to think what the character’s inner and outer goals might be but it’s not going to suggest anything.

So what’s the point of Story Planner?  Importantly, it keeps everything in one place and – like all apps these days – you can work on a desktop, tablet or phone.  It’s also really simple – almost to the point of being simplistic.  But is it for you?

I once had a program called Corkboard (I don’t think it’s still available) which was, as the name suggests, a digital replication of editable 6x4 cards pinned on a corkboard.  It was a great way to lay out scenes or the essential beats of a story entirely flexibly.  And it may be that all you really need is a good outliner like this to get things in order.  The closest apps I can find to Corkboard on the App Store today are Card Buddy and Corkulous.  These may be worth a try.

For now, I’m going to persevere with Story Planner just to see what happens but there are plenty of other tools out there that will do something similar.  No harm in looking at them as long as you know that none of them will provide a magic bullet when it comes to generating that killer idea.  That’s still down to you and your imagination. 

If you do use any kind of planning software — and you’d particularly recommend it — please let me know.

Happy writing!