screen writing software

Ruth came back talking about a friend who wants to get on writing her novel and that got me to thinking about software for narative writing.

I have a look at a number of screen writing apps and found them quite interesting. I was thinking about how similar novel/script writing is to thesis writing - you have to keep a lot in your head. You have to keep notes and keeping non physical notes help.

1. The key feature is outlining. 
1. This highly top down approach strikes me as a bit odd in an industry which regards its self as creative. I think this top down only approach reminds me more of software engineering than unlimited creative 
2. The most important feature is export format
1. looks to be key, again you would think that getting the format output would be the least of the problems but no it looks to be what people mostly use the software for. 
3. Many have a card sorting section 
1. this is just a 2d version of the outlining
4. Most of the apps have some kind of library/reference section to hold additional material  
5. Most apps help you keep track of words used. 

Some of the apps have interesting additions

• Moive Outline has a number of interesting additions 
• Feeling factors a graph showing some aspect ( action, conflict, tension ) and how it changes over a section 
• A character section which tracks the personal arc on a scene by scene basis 
• using four questions 
• what does x need in this step 
• what does x get from this step 
• what conflict or dilemma  does X face in this step 
• how does this step move X's story forward. 
• a profile section which has a number of questions and an interview zone
• A relationships which plots the relationships ( by time I'm not sure)
• A todo list - This I've see this in netbeans and eclipse 
• Spotlight - which pulls all the dialog of X together so you can check the phrase of voice. 
• Scrivener is a mac program which handles the outliner stuff
• Has a nice way of working with fragments you can then reoganise   
• Nice snap shot mode. 
• Fullscreen mode 
• I wonder how many programs ( pages, and now scrivener ) have this full screen mode for when your concentrating on something. 

My problem is that with this software we still get strangely awkward plot lines - Tomb Raider, Sky Captain being my favourites.

Things I would like to see 

1. Something to help you generate people - suggest names, identities, back ground plots possibly lots of stock pictures to help form a mental image.
2. Something to help generate locations 
1. either cities, landscapes, rooms, feelings  
3. Something to interupt the casual flow of the plot 
1. perhaps the machine automatically adds in cards into the script which challenge the writer to throw away some thing. Perhaps the machine adds in things like 'the protagonist is a woman' or 'Incorporate river into the plot' or 'your hero is guilty'. Perhaps you see an evocative picture of something - a large tree. See the very excellent trvropes 
4. Something to help with language 
1. perhaps substitutes words or has some notion of the kinds of language a person might use. Perhaps has a dictionary for each person which limits the words they might know
2. I like the notion of having access to a good dictionary of similar words - pages and Word do this well enough. 
5. I guess what I might be looking for is the textual equivalent of the photo shop filter. You apply a filter to the narrative and the machine alters it in some random way and you evaluate it looking for inspiration. 

1. Storyworld  works quite nicely ( but its paper )  it has Propp like characters/events 
6. Character renaming - so if you change something like name/sex/nationality the software can go through substituting requires a link to the original charater rather than text.
7. Narrative arc - 
1. This for me would be a visualisation which lets you see each character and how they interact in each scene. 
2. A large character by character time line
3. Like a visual Vladimir Propp
4. The idea is to look for inconstancies in the plot 
8. Reading age check - for children's novels guesses the reading age 
9. A synomyn check - looks for and underlines words which are spelt correctly and sound the same as the real world 
10. A text to speech facility like Narrator which lets you listen to your dialog with two ( or more ) voices which lets you test your dialog out.
11. Lots of ways to look at things in new ways. Similar to the feeling facors in plot above. 
1. For example have lots of diffrent types of paper/fonts and get a notbook printed out look. 
2. 
   

All in all it makes you wonder what they do to come up with a plot for a visual effects intensive film. The highly non visual elements of the software makes you wonder. 

re-reading this I'm starting to wonder if this has anything to do with the inability to see the narrative in details for the the child protection people ( from A previous post ).  Also how we can track narrative while looking through large amounts of forensic document data ( I problem I've heard about and blogged about before too ) How can we best illustrate over all narrative in addition to text ?