I have Dramatica Pro, ywriter and Liquid Story Binder. A bit on each below.
I use LSB regularly to keep stuff organised. My stories often have an historical component or a made-up-world component requiring intensive research and design, so I always have a lot of files to look after -- 50 or 60 files per project in multiple versions is not unusual. LSB is way better than just using folders, but the user interface is amateurish, unintuitive and irritating. They spend effort tweaking functions, but haven't much improved the user interface in recent years -- which is where I think the effort is really needed. If you just bought LSB to edit a manuscript file on a Windows platform, I reckon you'd do better with Wordpad or ywriter (see below).
Ywriter is another organisation/editing tool. It's less good with managing files, but does a good job of managing scenes and chapters. It's free, and updated regularly. Its main problem is that it's the work of one guy -- who also writes fiction -- and there's only so much he can do to develop it. I love how it works, but I always want it to do
more.
Dramatic Pro is not a writer's organisation/editing tool but a story design methodology packaged as software. One can't really critique the tool without first critiquing the methodology, so my comments are a bit lengthier.
Dramatica's methodology is theme-driven, which makes it great for the exactly 15.2% of all writers who start with themes, useful for another 49.8% who start with characters and nearly useless for the 34.9% who start with plot (*). It's built on a couple of simple, clever ideas which have been mystified almost to the point of religion, and they offer nearly as many books and courses as Scientologists. The methodology isn't fully integrated -- it's several disparate ideas that don't quite connect so you can find one part of the method useful, and another part utterly irrelevant.
It's more a ground-up design tool than an analytic or editing tool -- you can analyse a synopsis or outline and it may give you some insights, but it won't tell you about your manuscript, and it won't much help your WIP if you didn't
start your WIP with it. It has some really
good examples though, based on analysis of famous movies and books.
The software is 1990s technology and needs a solid overhaul; the user interface is amateurish and under-invested (but this seems to be common in writing tools: they either try and
look good or
do good, but seldom both at once).
As a themey, planny sort of writer, I use Dramatica for around 25% of my stories -- especially when I'm having trouble getting from theme to plot I'll sometimes play with Dramatica design, work out which bits I like and which bits I don't, then take it to outlining in some other tool like LSB, using my writerly sense to build on the framework. That seems to work quite well. I've never completed a full ground-up design in Dramatica and in its current form I doubt I ever will. [I suppose that makes me a Dramatica Heretic.
]
Hope that helps -- or something.
(*) Market estimates based on RUVSTATS -- a pseudoquantitative monosample of What's Good for Everyone factoids. Fully guaranteed -- if RUVSTATS doesn't meet your needs, return within 30 days for a Full Refund!
