Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Writer's Café
Can this software help you create better fiction? Ian Waugh pops into the Writer's Café to find out...
| Product | Writer's Café |
|---|---|
| Company | Anthemion Software |
| Web | www.writerscafe.co.uk |
| Price | £25 download, £32.90 CD |
| We like | Multi-platform support, superb Storylines feature, well priced |
| We don't like | Peripheral programs initially clutter the interface. |
| Rating | 8/10 |
| Requirements |
Writing fiction is not easy. At least writing good fiction is not easy even for most professional writers. If prose looks effortless and the plot flows smoothly you can bet the author sweated blood to make it that way. But there is much help on offer for the aspiring writer.
There are many tasks involved in creating a novel - plot construction, characterisation, structure and viewpoint among others - and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of books dealing with all areas of creative writing, some going into enough detail to give you a doctorate.
There are also many computer programs designed to help you write the perfect novel or screenplay. Some appear more daunting than a blank page, while others try to take you down avenues you don't want to go or pose questions that aren't relevant to your story.
Hand me a line
Writer's Café isn't complex and it doesn't ask awkward questions. It's a program of several parts and you can use any or all of them as you see fit. Its main section, however, is Storylines, a simple but powerful concept that helps you organise the plot elements in your story.
Many writers scribble ideas down on cards or scraps of paper and then shuffle them around to find the best place for each plot element within the story. With Storylines you create virtual cards and place them on horizontal timelines, much as you'd arrange instruments in a multi-track audio recording or video clips in a video editor. The timelines are likely to be viewpoint characters but they could be plots and sub-plots or even places if you're writing a split-screen movie!
You can see visually the order in which events take place and drag and drop a card to a new position on its timeline and even onto other timelines. This makes it easy to keep track of plot elements and see how they fit together into the story as a whole. It's ideal for any story with more than one plot line - and that must be virtually all modern fiction from the novel to films, soaps and TV drama. But there's more...
The cards in the timeline show a few words of text - the description of the scene. However, in an Edit section for each card you can include additional information. In the Content section, for example, you can add more details or even write the complete scene. In the Setting section you can add location and time, and in the Annotation section you can write additional notes about the scene.
Another very neat feature is the Reports function which brings together all the information about your story and presents it in a linear format. Just to spell it out - if you used the Contents section of the cards to write individual scenes, Reports will string them together. You can format this in a variety of ways suitable for screenplays and novels and export the entire Report in various file formats. You can then add bridging sections and start to polish your work. Wonderful!
Take note
There are several other features in Writer's Café such as a Notebook for jotting down ideas, a thesaurus, a Scrapbook where you can keep text, images and web links, a Journal for your daily thoughts, Cookies which offers snippets of random writing wisdom, a drag 'n' drop poetry creator and a patience game.
You might wonder about the usefulness of some of these and although you don't have to use them if you don't want to, the program does present you with a long list of options and it can take a little while to discover what's what and what's useful.
You also get an incredibly useful 60-page eBook called "Fiction: The Facts" written by Harriet Smart, author of 11 books who also co-developed the program. It's a succinct guide to writing fiction and covers "what ifs", characterisation, genre, point of view, setting, conflict, shape and structure, and includes tips on how to get published. If you're approaching your first novel, read this first.
One interesting feature of the program is that there are versions for Windows, Linux and the Mac OS. The program is available as a download and also on CD in a neat and unusual package.
Conclusion
Writer's Café doesn't attempt to lead you through every stage of the story creation process (if you need this perhaps you should ask yourself if writing is really for you). Instead it concentrates on helping you organise your plot ideas into a coherent linear story line, and it does it exceedingly well. You can download a very usable demo (with a limited number of cards) so you can test drive Writer's Café before you buy.
