Quote:
Originally Posted by hoichi
There was this Russian joke about an uncatchable cowboy called Joe (there were whole series of jokes where any gun-wielding mounted western character was called a cowboy). Anyway, it goes:
A guy comes to a town and all of a sudden sees a horseman that races by the main street at full speed and is soon lost in the puffs of dust.
“Who's that,” the man asks.
“That's the Uncatchable Joe,” they reply.
“What, can nobody catch him?”
“Nobody just gives a darn about him.”
No offence to Papel. I don't grok the whole visual mapping thing, but obviously a lot of people find it useful.
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I admit it: I've tried mind-mapping with EVERY damned program out there, not just for writing, but for everything else (website design, for example: to get to the meat of the thing, a la wireframing) and it just does NOT work for me. I'm patently not a visual creature, not in that way. It works for my good friend Holly Lisle, and she promotes it a lot in her "how-to" books and courses, which are incredibly successful (and her students go on to be very successful authors, which says something...), but I'm an outliner. Give me Word, outline view, and I'm at my best.
I find that the Snowflake Method is actually very useful for character development, and, if you do it right, it's a
surprisingly useful tool in "seeing' plot development opportunities. I think it might be utterly useless for something like non-fic or for experimental fiction, but for straightforward, character/plot-driven fiction, it works a treat.
I think that the Snowflake guy and his partner have a book out on Amazon that I saw, which is Goldilocks something /Snowflake. In it, he tells the story of how Goldilocks goes to a writer's conference, and chaos ensues, but I'm told it's really clever--each section is about how to use Snowflake, while showing how the author used Snowflake to create the characters and plot. A friend of mine bought it (a whopping $2, or something like that) and thought it was great; she'd tried pantsing and it didn't work, tried outlining and that didn't work, and the Snowflake thing really got her going. She's at 50K words now. so...who am I to argue with her success? She's further along than I am, although I admit, my hands run out of steam at the end of the business day. (That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.)
My personal fave program, for the "other stuff," though, is still good old YWrite. I have YWriter5, the paid version, and I really like the features. It's PLAIN. It doesn't have all the fancy foo-foo BS that something like LSB has. But you know what? it works. It's excellent for scene compartmentalization, drag-drop, and actually, it has wonderful time-lining. You pay attention to your characters, in what scenes, and it develops a really useful, not confusing, set of storyboards for you. Who's where, doing what, when? LSB's storyboarding is worthless, really--you can DO it, but
you have to
do it--the whole thing--
manually. I'm like, hell, if I knew that, I wouldn't be looking for a
program to do it, would I?
You can export Snowflake Pro to an RTF, which, if you've really worked it, creates a terrific basis for an entire novel. You can put an RTF into almost anything--Word, Scrivener, etc. You could easily break the final Synopsis (long version) into scenes for either Scriv, Word, LSB (if you must, sigh), or Ywriter.
Those are the tools I'd recommend. Word (or whatever word-processing program you like, as long as it has an outline-style view, with drag-drop, etc.), YWriter for actually writing the damn thing, and the Snowflake program, which I think I remember is pretty cheap, for character development. OH! One thing that LSB does have, that is fairly neat (if you can find a used copy somewhere, or...) is a character-naming program, which is handy. Other than that, it's not my cuppa. I thought it was all hat, no cattle, and the RTF export was badly flawed, as well. If you stick with something like OO/LO, Snowflake and YWriter, which has a free version, you could have everything you need, pretty darned free/cheap.
FWIW.
Hitch