A familiar interface helps to organize your writing.
Plenty of people entertain fantasies about writing the Great American Novel. The number of people who actually get that novel written—great or otherwise—is much, much less. Besides the talent, creativity, and motivation to keep it up for thousands and thousands of words, not having the right tools on hand can hamper the endeavor. No doubt you’ve already got a word processor on your Mac, but a specialized app for novel writing can offer features that regular word processors can’t match. And while those extra features alone won’t make a novel magically appear on your screen, having the right tool for the job makes the process of extended writing projects a lot easier, not to mention better organized.
Mariner’s StoryMill presents a paned, iTunes-style interface that will be instantly familiar to every Mac user. The far left contains your sources, organized into different groupings. You can use the hierarchical Source listing to jump to specific Chapters or Scenes—StoryMill’s most basic building blocks. You can also use this list to rearrange scenes or entire chapters within your text. Additionally, you can skip to notes you’ve entered on specific Actors (characters) or Locations, in addition to details for tracking submissions, research, and to-do items.
The center section is where you get down to business and actually write your text. The bottom of the text area features live word and character counts, which are great for anyone trying to meet specific targets. Our favorite feature is a built-in counter that tracks words, pages, or total minutes written, which can be a great motivator for lazy writers. And if you’re easily distracted, full-screen mode is perfect for blocking out everything but your clever inscriptions.
The right section of the StoryMill interface contains metadata about all of your various Scenes, Chapters, and other text and notes in your project. The tagging feature is useful for assigning arbitrary tags to bits of text, and when coupled with the Smart Views feature—like a Smart Playlist in iTunes—they can help you drill down and find exactly what you are looking for in a lengthy text. And since individual scenes can be assigned to specific times, a Timeline overview can help you see how your story is progressing, even if the storylines aren’t revealed in a linear fashion.
StoryMill can output to your text easily into Word and various plain-text formats, although we were a little put off by the fact that the app stores your text essentially in a database, making it hard to just open your project file in a text editor if something were to go sideways with StoryMill itself—although frequent manual plain-text exports can alleviate that problem. And we missed a versioning system for keeping multiple edits of a Scene or Chapter. But the database-like features for tracking Actors, Locations, and other data about your writing is amazingly helpful for managing the details of lengthy projects.
StoryMill offers essential organizational features for long-form writers that word processors miss.
Familiar interface. Easy rearrangement of scenes and chapters. Tagging and metadata options make it easy to manage large writing projects. Live word count. Can auto-save to MobileMe. Universal binary.
Data stored in a difficult-to-access format. No mechanism for multiple versions of Scenes or Chapters.
BillC
March 01, 2009 at 12:22pm
I'm a long time user of Story Mill, and I have tried Scrivener as well. I settled on Story Mill (and its earlier incarnation as Avenir) because its feature-set and approach to fiction writing fit my style better than Scrivener. In particular, I use tools in Story Mill that help me manage characters and scenes extensively. Scrivener is more general in its approach.Now, I think Scrivener is a great piece of software. My decision has to do with my work style.Both applications share certain similarities, both in organizational structure and working metaphors. They differ in the details, and it's those details that users should look at when deciding which is better suited to them. I've written two books and a half dozen stories in Story Mill, with more planned. I find SM to be a very powerful tool. I have friends who swear by Scrivener, including one who bought a Mac specifically FOR Scrivener. She's working on the fourth in a six-book contract in Scrivener.Ralph, you mention the price difference, but I suggest that difference is trivial compared to the actual features of the applications themselves. Both offer 30-day evaluation periods and active communities in support of them. I prefer Story Mill, but the decision about which is best for you might be best made in direct comparison. I see a great future for Story Mill, particularly as version 4 with versioning and other new features draws near, but I encourage potential users to try both and see which fits better.
RalphBassfeld
February 26, 2009 at 8:19am
How does this product compare to Scrivener by Literature and Latte? Scrivener is cheaper and is used by many writers.
http://literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
