One of the most intimidating tasks I have faced starting out as a novelist is arranging my ideas into a plan that will assist me to convert them into consistent 100,000 words. As a bear of little brain, it’s at least a lot times more many-sided than jotting down a few ideas for a thousand-word part of reporting or a blog post. If you are a pantser who lets the words flow, or a planner who details each scene in advance, you will need the outline of your story, as agents and publishers desire a full synopsis if your 10,000-word taster tickles their fancy. There is somewhat to submit a full outline of my novel, so finding the correct tool is more than a thought experiment.
Scrivener: Many proletarian and professional authors vow by the Scrivener, the long-form writing tool from Literature & Latte. It’s adequate for many writers on its own. When it comes to preparing a novel, there are key features: The binder sidebar lets you organize the structure of your parts, chapters and scenes, which you can colour-code to demonstrate their status (or by narrator or place, if that’s your thing), and drag-and-drop to alter their order. Finally, the outliner view shows the same synopsis info along with things like word counts, rank indicators, when you wrote them and progress bars if you’ve set yourself targets.
Scapple: It is Scrivener’s little brother — a mind-mapping tool from Literature & Latte — and its main benefit is that you can drag-and-drop from Scapple into Scrivener, or vice-versa. If you’re the kind of person who likes to lay out your ideas with the liberty of a mind map previous to starting writing, it’s an ideal cohort to Scrivener that lets you get initiated very rapidly without having to learn your way around.
Xmind: If you desire an influential mind-mapping pack that will let you do all from free-form thinking to timelines and organizational charts, you’ll require something like Xmind (and there are a lot of mind-mapping packs). Xmind 8 is a standalone pack that is used broadly in the free edition. The Pro edition costs US$129 (£99). Xmind ZEN has a new engine and is perhaps better, but if you introduce to ZEN you can’t revisit to Xmind 8.
Aeon Timeline: An easy outlining tool like Scrivener’s corkboard or Scapple can create it rigid to keep track of your who’s doing what to whom, when and where, mainly if you’re writing something with a classic or historical scale. Aeon Timeline helps you to make a story outline, absolute characters, locations and story arcs, on a timeline view that lets you zoom in and out at any scale from seconds to millennia. You can utilize predictable calendars or make your own calendar for the Munchkin kingdom on the planet Zarg.
Trello: Some writers use Trello for all for fundamentals like story outlining and character planning. Trello’s flexible like that, plus it’s vast for mutual projects and you can utilize it across devices.
