StoryView

My initial experience with the program was less than encouraging. I found the interface to be confining and more often than not confusing. The program's tool bars are stuffed with dozens of ill identified buttons. Believing I just was not prepared to tackle the project I took to reading all the features of "Storyview" after working through the online tutorial and reading the entire help index I tried the process again with similar results. Writing with "Storyview" is a frustrating process.

The examples provided were less than helpful. "Storyview" boasts being able to display ones entire story timeline, which is true but when you achieve any sort of detail the story elements become eye straining and text is presented in all different directions, inverted, If one wanted to insert a small scene somewhere two thirds of the way through the plot you would have to hunt for the place to put it scene by scene. I fail to see how this is an improvement over 3X5 cards. The problem being that the timeline is not an outline at all it is just a list of the narrative of the events in the story.

The largest insult is the fact that the brainstorming template is a largely a blank page with three areas for story points, character summaries and story events. Wow that was helpful.

In the end how did I plot out my story? With 3X5 cards.


Essential   June 4, 2002
 31 out of 32 found this review helpful

I will spare you another discription of the features, they are numerous and easy enough to find. Instead, and given that there is some resistance, more on the part of novelists than film folk, to using software tools, I'll focus this on how my writing style meshed with the program and perhaps that will help you in your evaluation of whether the program will work with yours.

For starters, I dispise index cards and all the standard approaches to organizing. Found them too limiting, and not in synch with the way I think. I'm more comfortable having all of my book related materials on my computer than I am having the manuscript on the hardrive and everything else tacked to the wall or whatever. Because that stuff never worked for me I tried not to use it. The result was a poorly organized folder of Word docs and several bastardized Lotus applications that never really got the job done.

Storyview gets the job done. It presents in a way I'm comfortable with and the features are incredible. I've gone from not being able to keep up with stuff I needed to know, to exploring and structuring in greater depth b/c the tool box is so full that I can't pass it up.

I use Storyview in combination with the companion software Dramatica and a competitor's product named Power Structure. Might be a tad overkill, and certainly isn't because of any shortcoming with Storyview. If you're on the fence; comfortable with software tools for your creative projects, but hesitant to invest in something that might demand your writing become a slave to its programing. Or if you are weary of buying some poor improvement on the jokes that were first generation writing programs, Storyview is an excellant test-the-waters intro to a new realm of tools.