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NewNovelist
Software So here’s the thing.
I’ve never finished a novel. I
was more than halfway through my first novel before realizing the darn thing had
no plot. Even so, I hoped all my
months of work would be salvageable, so I asked a friend to read the first few
pages. “Well, the style is brilliant,” he said, “But it sort
of just wanders... what’s it about?” Hmm. Yeah. The problem was that I had started with a vague idea and
just decided to write, stream-of-consciousness style. It didn’t work out so hot and I wrote myself into a corner.
I decided novels weren’t for me. When I was asked to review the NewNovelist software, I
shrugged it off. It didn’t
interest me too much because I didn’t plan on ever writing another novel.
But I opened the software on a whim one day, nearly a year after I was
invited to check it out. Wham—it asked me for a story name. Not a final title, it reassured, but just something to work
with. Well, okay.
“Marty,” I typed. First thing that popped into my head. Then it wanted a story concept. One line. This
is something I rarely do when working on fiction until after it’s done.
I’d written many screenplays, and always worked on the loglines after I
finished. This forced me to come up
with a story concept—one line that told the character, conflict, and
resolution—before I even began. And
I couldn’t move on until I did that. I
couldn’t ramble, either—it gave me limited space so I was forced to boil it
down to a barebones concept. “Marty inherits a house and he doesn’t want it. Winds
up staying.” I just typed something coherent to get to the next screen,
you see. That’s where it asked me what kind of story I wanted to
create: Plot, Epic, or Character. There
were descriptions of each. This was my first stumbling block; I didn’t agree with
the distinctions. For example,
character-driven stories, it tells me, always have happy endings.
That’s not true. And I don’t believe that stories need to be one or the
other (plot-driven, epic, or character-driven).
Still, Character was the best choice for me, so I clicked it.
It asked me to further narrow the type of story I wanted to write, then I
got to the juicy screen: World Creation. On this screen, I was asked to write first about Marty’s
“ordinary world.” This is the
place the character starts out at the beginning of the novel, before the action
hits. I was asked to provide short
descriptions of the smells, the atmosphere, a typical day in my hero’s life,
the hero’s main activities... Then there’s the “extraordinary world,” where the
adventures begin. Here, I was asked
to describe the antagonist’s world in the same level of detail as the hero’s
world. Where does this antagonist
hang out? What do the
antagonist’s friends do? Following this, I was led through several screens where I
painted a picture of my hero and the hero’s helpers, the antagonist and his
helpers, and incidental characters. Then I began the twelve-step story creation.
There are examples and tutorials every step of the way.
Here, I outline exactly what my hero is going to go through, how he’s
going to grow, how everything will be resolved.
And it’s the place to actually start writing my novel, jumping around
as I wish, but with this structure as my framework. There’s also a spot for “Global Notes”—those
flashes of brilliance that come to you that you must jot down right now even if
you don’t know just where they fit. I can look at lists of all my characters and all my
settings and change names at will. I
can also generate a report as a Rich Text format that will consolidate all the
work I’ve written into one file in manuscript format, and I can keep working
on it from there. What excited me about this software is that after I was
forced to think through the first few characterizations and plot points, I
actually wanted to write this novel. I
had no intention of writing about Marty and his house.
It was just a kernel of an idea that sounded good enough to plug in just
to see how the software worked. But
before long, I felt organized. I
felt that I had the right elements to work with.
It provided me with structure in a painless way; it didn’t feel
uncreative, and I felt like I had a map to work with instead of aimlessly
hunting for buried treasure. I didn’t agree with every structural device or some of
the tutorial descriptions, but that’s fine.
As with most creative tools, it’s completely okay to use what works for
you and ignore the rest. If your
idea of a genre doesn’t jell with the software’s idea of a genre, no
problem: mentally fill in your own instruction in place of anything you want to
change. I like this as a litmus test of a story’s potential.
In just a few hours, you can work your way through the first stages and
figure out if your story has wings. You
can get into your character’s mind and world and decide if you want to devote
your time to this story, now that you have evidence of whether or not it’s
compelling. And if not, you can
just open a new file and build another story. There’s no Mac version of NewNovelist yet, but PC users, this is a piece of software I can heartily recommend. It’s fairly priced and could be a great tool for anyone who feels a little lost when beginning a novel. If Marty becomes a cult classic, you'll know where it all began. Check out NewNovelist by clicking here.
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