Until recently, all my writing has been done using MS Word. Not because I particularly loved the program, it was just on the computer and I was vaguely familiar with it. It worked fine for me. Since I did minimal planning anyway, I just needed something that would let me sit down and hammer out words.
With my recent forays into actually planning out what the hell I’m doing before I do it, though, I started looking at Scrivener. Scrivener is a program designed specifically for writing books, and it has a whole lot of features that make that process easier. It helps you organize all your research, your world building notes, and helps you set up an outline. You can even set up your book as part of a series, so all the notes and work that you did for the first book is right there for any others that might follow.
There are also some nifty features for tagging each chapter of the book so that you know what characters appear where, or what location this part of that part of the plot takes place in. Or what parts need work. And it’s very flexible about moving parts around. All this makes editing and revising a lot easier.
I’ve had it for a couple of weeks now, and I’m really liking it. Yes, I have to avoid playing with the silly features– like searching the internet for pictures of people that look like the main characters and putting them in. But so far its been very useful, and I haven’t even messed with most of the features. Like the name generator.
A name generator.
Anyway, Scrivener. It’s a good tool for the big, complicated jobs. Like secondary world fantasy books.
Which always, invariably, involve oodles of names.
Have I mentioned I hate coming up with names?