software for writing books

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Metal Mick

I gave a lot of thought and many rereads and drafts of my last post before I responded. I took exception to some of what you wrote because of the way you phrased your tirade, even the closing statement of your initial post is insulting. And if you say the program is perfect for "fritterers", and I have a licensed copy then your comments are directed at me. There isn't a lot of apparent care in how you phrase things. Read below:

Well, listen: I stand by what I said, even if I either said it inconsiderately, or it was interpreted badly, or some combo thereof. I still think it's mostly hat, no cattle; I do think that it appeals to people who want more...visual stimulation. I also think that it could distract people from actually writing. We all know people who procrastinate, wanting to collect "more research" or "more images of County X," or this that or the next thing. If anything, I'd say that LSB (and perhaps, Scrivener--but I can't speak to that), actually enables that behavior. I have plenty of procrastination techniques of my own--fortunately, the "bright-shiny-pretty-thingy" vice isn't one of them. Mine are not "better;" they're simply different. So, perhaps, instead of saying "frittering," I should have used the 100 words I just used, to explain what I meant in a less offensive way. I also think that Freemind is a perfect program for fritterers--does this mean that every person who has it IS a fritterer? NO. I simply mean that it has a lot of potentially time-wasting capabilities that would appeal to fritterers. I still think the same thing about LSB. Hopefully, this time, the statement will convey what I mean and neither more nor less. And anyone who's ever seen a DIY kids' book made in Word will know full well that WORD has a ton of capabilities that appeal to prospective fritterers, as well, albeit, probably fewer than Freemind or LSB.

You don't seem to have read what I've written previously in this thread on LSB, nor your own words. Your final comment - as with many others in your second post - can easily be read as being phrased to denigrate or belittle. Is it any wonder I took exception? I could easily insert snide remarks into this response - as you have done - but I've taken care not to.

For, I think, the third time, I'm sorry you take them as snide. I take them as rather pissed off at the software. For example, you say that you can take completed chapters, put them in a Storyboard, move them around, and output the result--that's what you said a post back. Not to be dense, but, how, exactly, did you do that? You said you tested it. If I have a builder with chapters in it, and I want to play around with those sequences (say, chapters as scenes, whatever)--how? I can't export the chapters from A builder to a Storyboard (which I genuinely think would seem fairly fundamental as a feature). Just out of curiosity--if you'll indulge me-when you took, say, 10 chapters in your WIP, from your builder, a) how did you put them INTO Storyboard, and then, when you'd shifted them hither and yon, how did you export the chapters (replete with text, of course) back to a builder with all the chapter titles and all the chapter text intact, simply reordered?

As you said you'd done it, I'd like to know, because I've tried numerous ways; they all require me to manually re-enter the individual chapter titles into the Storyboard, then associate the chapters in Chapter mode, and then, when I export the re-ordered "chapters" to a builder, all I get are the chapter titles-not the related chapter TEXT. I've tried this at least 10 different ways, and I do not see any way to take existing, typed chapters from a builder (nor planner) to a Storyboard, move them around for a while and then send the resorted chapters, in sequence, back to a builder/planner with the relevant chapters still attached to the chapter TITLES. So--what did you do, please? As I also said--I did actually ask the developer, back in about Spring of 2010, and he did, at that time, say it "didn't work that way." I admit, I then thought it was a pretty silly feature, because the same thing can be done with ease in Word, and move all the chapter TEXT, too, without all the retyping, cutting-and-pasting, etc., with one click, drag and drop If you have an automated way in LSB that means the chapter titles DO export in toto and in sequence to the Storyboard, swap them all about, and then automatically export them all (with content) back IN, I would genuinely be desirous of learning it.

I don't mind if you or others don't like LSB, nor if their preference is to use several different applications instead of one: strong arguments can be made for either course. There's lots here who like Scrivener, WriteWay, and other applications and they are productive in them. That's fine by me: I'm certainly not an evangelist for LSB. I have written a lot in just a wordprocessor, using whatever features that I felt were useful, but I find the "novel-writing" software provides more for the way I work.

I only post my experiences (both good and bad) here so others have a bit more information than they otherwise might not get.

I last seriously used Word when it was known as Word 6 - even then it had lots of scope for customizing, even changing colours! I doubt that has changed at all, and it is certainly a part of LibreOffice. But that wasn't why I stopped using Word, nor did I take exception to the developers including that feature, even though it was of little use to me.

I guess the bottom line is that if you have a message to pass on, give it a little thought first, and leave the snide comments out.

Cheers,

BTW--for the record--it actually takes a significant amount of frustration with software to get me to the "shriek" stage. We work with it all day long; we build hundreds of ebooks monthly--I'm not "new" to software frustration. By the time I "shriek" at a software developer, I've utterly lost my sense of humor. It's not an instantaneous reaction, by far.

I also actually started out--believe it or not--with ye olden OS/6--not Word; IBM standalone word processing machines, one step up from the IBM Selectric II. Before the advent of the desktop computer. I started with WordStar and then with Lotus' then-product WordPerfect. I loathed Word for years, thinking it was Satan-spawn, until I kicked myself in the ass and spent a whopping two hours learning the more advanced and less-known features. I don't say lightly that once learned, Word is actually a fairly fabulous program. I know, I know--I'd never have thought I'd have heard the words come out of my mouth--but it's true.

When I compare what I just tried to describe, (vis-a-vis the storyboards), to using Word's outlining/document map functioning, where I can just grab a chapter title and move the whole section, with the concomitant text, in 1 second...well, yes, it's hard for me to see the advantage. If people work better with storyboards, then, yes, I can see the purpose. But not if what I've described is accurate--manually type the chapter titles to get the chapters themselves to match up with their related chapter heads in Storyboard, then move things around, and then export it as a Builder...to only get the same Chapter heads? So you have to C&P the chapters BACK into the Builder? Then I'd say it's not great.

I also found the "styles" in the exported RTF kind of a giant pain to deal with. I was surprised--and, no, I don't remember all the details now--of how MUCH clean-up I had to do in Word to get the RTF--which should import beautifully--to work properly. I was pretty irritated by that, as well. I wasn't even USING Styles in LSB--this was just garbage-y codes that got exported for no discernible reason. Again--we work with Styles in RTF and Word and CSS in HTML all day long, so this isn't alien territory to me; I was pretty perturbed at how much clean-up it took for a simple text-only document to be cut-and-pasted into Word and cleaned of oddball style issues.

I liked the Outline function. I don't think it's anything particularly wonderful; but it's workable. (I'd like it better if, again, one didn't have to then create all the relevant chapters by typing their headings by hand a second time so they could be manually associated with the Outline headers--why not just an export function that lets you create X number of pre-named Chapters? As you can do with a Planner?) As we've agreed, the mindmaps are pretty dismal. I won't speak to keeping Character "Journals." Everybody writes their own way. I don't think I quite get the reasoning for having an "images" function separate from a "gallery" function. I'm sure there is one--I simply don't get it. With regard to the "timeline" function, as I said--it seems to require that the writer create all the entries--you have to manually create a timeline for each chapter of your manuscript (that you've already written), etc. One of the things that I rather liked about YWriter was that it automatically generated the timelines for each character itself--so you could easily see that you'd put "Kate" in two scenes occurring at the same time. As far as I can tell, LSB's timeline does not do that for you; for it to "work," you have to manually type in all the entries. I can see that being pretty tedious if you had 25 characters with interwoven story lines. OTOh, the way that works may have been changed as well, as I'm sure you're going to tell me that the Storyboarding has been changed.

I just think that to make it work the way it's advertised to work takes a whole lot of workarounds. To me, that's not efficient.

My last line of my last post wasn't intended as snarky, EITHER. I meant it. At this point, I'm afraid to say anything to you that's open to interpretation, so I'll limit it to, goodnight.

Hitch

[Dr. Drib]

As a Moderator, I would just like to make a comment about how courteous these discussions have been concerning some of the 'stickier' points of LSB.

Even though there have been a few ripples of disagreement, as well as certain differenes regarding interpretative stances, both principal parties involved are attempting to be courteous and understanding in their analyses as they work through this discussion.


So....BRAVO!


Don
(Moderator)

[BookCat]

This discussion is fascinating me regarding the software - LSB - which the parties are talking about. Differing points of view are always very helpful to any prospective purchaser.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BookCat

This discussion is fascinating me regarding the software - LSB - which the parties are talking about. Differing points of view are always very helpful to any prospective purchaser.

Well, I for one am definitely interested to know if there are things in LSB I'm missing, or if there are faster, better ways to do the glitchy (to my way of thinking) things I've described. I'm accustomed, as I stated, to using the Document Map in Word, which allows me to reorder things instantly, from both a logical and visual aspect. I don't ever have to think about numbering (granted, coming from a background in which I created very long legal documents for the hotel projects I built, yes, this matters to me more than the average person, but we see books in here every single day with mis-numbered chapters, either missing numbers or dupes. With document map, that never happens, because Word does the numbering for you).

I don't understand why the developer would not make the Chapter reordering (or scene, whatever) in the visual uses (the Storyboards/Sequences) not automatically synch, upon request, with the existing typed chapters. This, to me, is utterly illogical. The point of software is to do automatedly what we used to do by hand. IF I'm correct, and the Storyboard only allows you to re-order the chapter HEADERS and then output them to a new Builder, then I don't see the point. All it does, it seems, is allow one to sit there with a picture that depicts a scene and a chapter title, and move the "scenes" around like Scrabble tiles--and then you can either a) output the reordered chapter TITLES to a new Builder (and then manually Associate those chapter titles/names to the actual, typed chapter, one at a time), or just sit there in the existing Planner or Builder (or Outline) and click the up and Down arrows to reorder the chapters the way you've now re-envisioned them in the Storyboard. I'm sorry, but that seems terminally DUMB to me. How hard would it have been to have a "synch to matching chapter heads" function, so that the author wouldn't have to do all that work? This basically already works in Planners; you type a chapter name, and when you double-click it, if there's a matching chapter, it auto-populates. But NOT in a Builder, which is where you output the re-ordered chapter titles TO. I don't get that.

Like I said--and I wish I still had YWriter on my laptop; I had it in there with a 60K word story I abandoned, but not knowing I was going to have this dicussion, I nuked it. In YWriter, as long as you set the timeframes for the scenes, it calculates where the characters are at any given time FOR you. LSB, you have to re-input all that data into the "timeline" function.

I actually asked for (and I don't remember why) the contrast function. You can create two lists, and, well, contrast them. I think at the time, I thought it might be useful for "before" and "after," or good v. evil, or something like that, but basically, it's a two-column table, into which you can type text. That's all it is. I can do that in OneNote just as rapidly.

I have created a Builder recently, and when I think of bits of this and that, or the opening for a scene, or a story, I type it in a builder item, but honestly, it's mostly to convince myself that I'm using LSB for something. As I have OneNote open all the time (for phone call message to me), I could do that in there, also, probably faster than in LSB, and with greater ease--a notebook with "story ideas," one to a "page," or bits of dialogue or a scene...whatever.

As I stated up top, I would truly like to know if there are faster ways this works. I'd like to know what it does that is so fantastic, that some people swear by it. I am the first to say, as I think I have, that if you use a lot of visual aids, I guess it may be very helpful. I do use some photos from time to time, but not as heavily as many people, I'd guess. I am a total software hound--I buy and try software like crazy, always looking for something cool or useful--but LSB kind of burned me on "writing software," because after trying it, and having "heard" that it's "much like Scrivener," which seems to be the "cool kids' toy," I've decided that maybe writing software is just not for me. I find LSB to have a lot of distractions, and create a lot of "time-burning," (like the storyboards, spending a ton of time deciding on a background image and colors for the setup, creating galleries that are supposed to "inspire" you, creating journals for your "characters," etc. etc. etc.), during which I could actually be working. it feels frivolous, to me. Like it spends more time on the frillery and foofery and less on the WORK of writing. Now, lots of other people may ignore all that, or, hell, doing all that may inspire them and get them writing. We all know that writers all work differently. This last part, about time-burning, etc., is simply how it seems to me. It's not a discussion of anyone else's work habits or or suggestion of a lack thereof.

I guess what aggravates me is that it does not feel like it takes writing seriously, and the stuff it does easily (like making galleries or creating pretty backgrounds or making pretty storyboards) isn't the stuff that people need to get work DONE, like, the ability to reorder stuff in a storyboard and then output a reordered manuscript. At its heart, and I know I said this all before, it's a DB with some RTF files and some images--that's it. I just don't think it would have been that hard for the developer to go the extra step to add the type of computerized, software-based actual functionality to it to avoid these repetitive steps. I also know that the Yahoo group is decidedly slower than it was when I first started two years ago, which either means that ALL the new users are way smarter than those who came before them, or that there are very few new users. I suspect it's the latter, now that Scrivener has a PC-version, and that's not a good sign for the future, but that's a very loose deduction on my part.

So, if I'm wrong about all these functions, I genuinely would like to know it. I'd love to love my software again.

Hitch

[David Munch]

Over the next 8 days, the new Macheist bundle is available for 25$. The reason I'm posting it here, is that it includes Scrivener (45$) and Evernote with 13 months of Premium activation (60$) - So I'm definitely getting it.
Note that this is Mac only, thus no Windows versions! 25% of each purchase also goes to charity...

Full list of apps for those interested, with a total value of 539$:
- Bejeweled 3
- Scrivener
- Courier
- PDF Signer
- Artboard
- Jurassic Park
- Sam and Max
- Strong Bad
- Radium
- DiskTools Pro
- Evernote (With 15 months of Evernote Premium included)
- HDRtist
- Firetask*
- BioShock 2*
- Painter Lite*

* means that they will be available to all, when 25.000 bundles have been sold. As of this post, 7000 has been sold.

[BookCat]

Note to anyone doing NaNo: there are a few deals during Nano. Afterwards, there are deals for participants and even better ones for winners. The ones which interested me were Scrivener and WriteWay Pro, each offering a free trial over NaNo and 50% reductions for the winners. There are lots of deals which are Mac only and some other deals that Windows users might be interested in.

[Hitch]

On this note, as a follow-up to my LSB XE posts:

I decided that I was so irked at LSB XE that it was actually putting me off. For what it's worth, I've reinstalled YWriter, and Simon's made some nice changes to it in the 2 years since I'd used it. He's updated it for Win7, and I like what he's done with it. It's a nice, impressive little program, and I cheerfully registered (paid for) my copy, to encourage him to keep working on it.

Hitch

[Metal Mick]

Hi all,

I thought it was necessary to put a few final words regarding the issue of LSB here. I've spent a fair while trying to decide just how to phrase things without coming across as promoting this particular software (while still giving useful information to MR members). So, we'll see how I go. What I won't do is make this a tutorial on how to use LSB - that's been done already, plus there is the mailing list on the (admittedly, execrable) Yahoo! site (so be prepared for some of your messages there to go missing).

I did take note of the claimed issues regarding rtf output. I've had problems getting it into LibreOffice - it comes in jumbled (like a 10,000 word chapter overtyped onto four or five lines) which irks me, but ctrl-A and then selecting say, a Body Text style sorts things out. Still, it shouldn't happen. I don't have Word, but in WordPad, any file or generated manuscript comes in fine without any apparent spurious characters. At least on my machine.

Regarding word processors, I'd probably still be using Lotus' WordPro (not WordPerfect as has been erroneously reported) for my writing because some of its features are still unparalleled today as far as I know, like being able to create tabbed sub-documents with unique style sheets, and being able to reorder them easily by dragging; as far as I'm concerned, its handling of bullets and numbers is still far more logical than anything in LibreOffice, nor from what I've seen, Word.

When I spat the dummy with MyNovel (earlier in this thread), I tried yWriter (again, and for at least the fifth time) because several people here gave it a good rap, but I just found I didn't like the way it worked, and for a while I even thought it was pretty limited in what it could do, because of the way it worked. There was just a severe incompatibility with the way its creator provided tools for me to use, and where I was expecting to find them. Still, I've downloaded it again, and will look into it again when I have time and I'll see how it works out for me, when I start on my next novel.

On that topic, I looked long and hard at WriteItNow because the reviews I read about it were quite glowing. I passed on it. Its character dossiers irritated my colon beyond all measure, for it obliged or encouraged me to assign a numeric value to a character trait like honesty. Okay... but what exactly would it mean to me as a writer, if I had one character at say 85% honesty and another at 75% or 84%? Simply, I had never, ever thought in those terms and doubt there is sufficient youthfulness ahead of me to start doing so now.

Oh, and its word-processing tools were at best, rudimentary, which again, irked me.

Thank goodness for demos!

Currently, I'm nearing the 100k word mark in the first draft of my novel, and though I'm doing it all in LSB, I can't claim proficiency yet, though the tools I do use seem to work very well. Setting different "modes" for say a planner, or dossier, is still incomprehensible to me and the help files are unilluminating, but when I have time I'll ask at the mailing list for a more detailed explanation. I can create a planner (say Chapter List), and set it to Dossier mode, Chapter mode, Planner mode, and about a half-dozen more. I don't know what the differences are, but eventually I'll find out.

A shortcoming I haven't mentioned before is that I can only have 3 chapters open at once, and this seems to be a function of the software used to create the program. I don't like it, though and the limitation applies to all file types.

I tried Scrivener, and tend to refute claims that it and LSB are similar. Unless I've missed them, there aren't any wordprocessing tools in Scrivener and things in LSB are absent from Scrivener and vice versa.

To me, it makes no difference if I'm the sole person on MobileRead who likes LSB - it works for me, and after finding a predominantly green UI colour scheme in the first day or so, I haven't visited that part of the program since. Green, I am told is easier on the eyes, so that's what I went with. Adding around 75k words since mid-July tends to indicate the program doesn't provide a handicap to my creativity. If LSB is prompting me to play with colors needlessly, then I'm either ignoring it or the signs are so subtle that I can't detect them.

I have only dabbled with the storyboard and other visual aspects of LSB because I tend not to work that way. Besides, although the website shows how they are used, I lack the time and energy to hunt down pictures I can use, let alone create them. Rather, I have a vivid imagination, a love of the language, and a determination to put the scenes I imagine into words that are uniquely mine, and then onto a page. I have no clear idea what a "visual" person is, but if my previous sentence indicates a working definition, then I'd run with that. Two things I'd love in LSB: spell-as-you-go, and also being able to store links to web pages easily. Little things, but I miss them badly. MyNovel had both.

An unexpected tool is the thesaurus: highlight a word in a sentence and the thesaurus gives a string of alternatives, each within the highlighted word in the sentence, so you can read an alternative and decide if the fit is okay.

I wish you all the best with your endeavors, but as I said, my novel is getting near its end (at least as far as first draft is concerned) and I shall soon start on the second draft. I doubt I will have an excess of time to return here too often, but I'll try.

In the meantime, I'd encourage everyone interested in such software to try the demos for fit and functionality, and if at the end you find you prefer four or more applications over one, go with that - I've been there and done that too. If your choice makes you productive, how can that be wrong? And if you happen to prefer an attractive workspace, don't let anyone brand you a dilettante, nor allow yourself to be bullied by those who rail against your choice just because they prefer something else.

Regards to all.