Writer's Cafe Offers Novel Approach to Writing
By: Rob Reilly
Thursday, November 9, 2006 11:32:32 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6330/1/
The Quest for Literary Greatness on Tux
As a fiction or novel writer, are you searching for a writing tool to help you harness your creativity and get down to efficiently developing your plot? You might have a cast of characters and need to incorporate several different sub-plots. Maybe you think in a non-linear fashion and need to get your million dollar manuscript done sometime this next... oh, I don't know... decade.
Perhaps you are a Linux user, too.
UK-based Anthemion Software, Ltd. has combined a story line editor, notebook, journal, a vector-based graphical tool, and several writing enhancement programs into a neatly bundled suite called Writer's Cafe. The program's focus is to capture characters, plot twists, and dialog quickly, in a way that is easily edited later and aid in managing the content production process (see Figure 1).
The program is available via CD or online and will load under Linux distributions running glibc 2.2.9 or later. The company also sells a version that runs on Windows 98 through XP. Pricing is $50 for the CD and $45 for the downloaded version. Similar products include Final Draft and Y-Writer.
Let's take a look inside the package.
Storylines: The Main Tool
The Storylines editor is the main tool in the Writer's Cafe suite. With it you can lay out your novel or script into scenes, with multiple plots, sub plots, and characters.
Storylines uses the concept of cards to grab descriptions, content, annotations, images, and players. To get started the author inserts a new card and starts typing their idea. Next idea, new card. You can add cards whenever you want and stick them in any location, on any story or plot line.
The technique works well for brainstorming, because ideas need to flow out without restraint and be captured as quickly as possible. After the initial brain dump of story parts, cards can be moved around, edited, added, and deleted, as needed. The description (which you specified) is displayed on each card and you can click on the various tabs to edit the other card data.
All this information is collected as you input your ideas. When you're ready to see it all on paper, a report can be generated that contains all your story data as an HTML file, a plain text file, an OpenOffice.org Writer (.sxw), or an Anthemion Helpview file. The report style can be a novel, a screenplay, or in a tabular form.
I used Storylines to develop a quick story. The cards helped me organize and consolidate the main concepts. The story began with why, what, how, and conclusion plot lines. I roughly broke up paragraphs into cards along each plot line. I added cards and content as the story matured.
Several topics didn't initially fit onto any of the plot lines. No problem. I just created a card as usual, putting it in a random spot on the screen. I then right clicked to bring up the card menu and used the "Move to Pocket" menu item to park the card in the Pocket holder. When I finally got around to figuring out where the card should go, another right click followed by "Insert" stuck the card at the last cursor location. The Pocket menu also let me clean out cards that I decided would never have a home in the story.
Pockets let you save and manage scraps of random information that you'll use as the story evolves.
About a quarter way through generating content I printed out a screenplay report and saw that the data was arranged in scenes (shown horizontally from left to right on the screen) and progressed through the plot lines from top to bottom. A typical screenplay format layout. The story information followed a similar scheme, when I printed it using the tabular style.
For short pieces, it might take a little effort to get efficient with content production. The program will definitely help me with brainstorming and story development.
Writer's Cafe has a few other bundled applications that will help writers.
Scrapbooks, Image Scraps, and Notes
Writer's Cafe has an application set called Scrapbooks. Scrapbooks are made up of "scraps." They might be little text tidbits. The could be a .jpg, a .gif, or any number of other images. As many writers now do research on the Web, the Scrapbook also has a place for URL scraps. All of these are simply copied from the user's desktop clipboard and pasted into the appropriate Scrapbook category. As a scrapbook is built up, scraps can then be copied and pasted into cards in Storylines.
Collage scraps, are created with a simple vector based graphics program. You can draw circles, squares, and other shapes, along with text. If you are familiar with mind maps, the program lets you connect the shapes with lines that re-route automatically when you move a shape. Mind maps are also a good brainstorming tool. If you need to make pretty charts or diagrams, draw the shapes and lines, then make everything neat and tidy with the alignment buttons.
Writers will find the built-in notebook and journal handy, too. As you would expect, the notebook is organized as consecutive pages, whereas entries in the journal fall under consecutive dates.
Two other tools you should know about are the slide show and timer. Both can be found on the menu bar under the View tab on the main Writer's Cafe screen.
Click on the Scrapbook, then the slide show menu item to view all the images one by one. The program was a little clunky, because upon starting, the slides would flash by at about ½ second intervals. I couldn't figure out how to adjust the speed. Also, the only way I found to cycle through all the images was to right click on an image and choose the file name to display. After that step, the slides would rotate through the order with the up arrow key. I couldn't get the other arrow keys, or the page up/down keys to do anything, which was odd.
The timer can be used to give yourself a writing time limit. Some people like that little extra incentive to get a paragraph or page done in a certain time. The timer also shows when you bring up the writing prompt program (under the yellow star button on the main Writer's Cafe screen). Read the line of text, start the timer and write about it. A great way to limber up your writing noodle.
Wrapping Up
Writer's Cafe is a reliable product that can definitely help you with your story development and content management. I'm planning to give it a good try for organizing some of my technical articles.
The fact that vendors like Anthemion Software are now offering targeted, specialized programs, is great for the Linux desktop. I'm betting that more vendors will follow suit.
Rob Reilly is a consultant, trend spotter, and writer. He is a contributing editor for Linux Today. He advises clients on portable business computing and presentation technology integration. You can visit his web page at http://home.earthlink.net/~robreilly.