StoryBook is a novel writing software primarily for creative writers, novelists and authors to assist them to structure their writing and manage the strands in their books and novels. Even if you are not a full time writer, or if you pursue writing as a hobby, you could get pretty bogged down with all the characters, locations and details entailed in your piece.
Now, with StoryBook, you can neatly arrange all these details and sort through them in an easy to view manner. Start off by using the application, by creating a new project accessible from ‘File > New Project’. Once you have a blank page ready, simply add in new characters and locations.
The program has a toolbar with buttons pertaining to all the functions available; it is easy to create them with the click of a button. Clicking the ‘New character’ button brings up a window for you to enter the character’s first and last name, abbreviation, gender, birthday, death-day, occupation and description, clicking ‘New location’ brings up a window here, key in information like the name of a place, city, country and its description. As soon as you have keyed in all this basic information, you can add new chapters and strands easily.
There is an option to either start with the default strand that was automatically created when you began with the new project, and simply rename it, or create a completely new strand from ‘Strands > New strand’. Strands gather together all the plot lines in your book and let you view them concurrently. It also helps you to easily associate strands with an abbreviation and color; besides this it also helps to quickly identify which chapter is linked with which strands.
When you add a ‘New Chapter’ the resulting window prompts you for the chapter number, date, part, strands, locations, characters and a short summary. It is possible to easily associate each chapter with various strands, locations and characters since they are all listed as checkbox options. Thus, you can select multiple elements to establish relationships with the chapter.
Another feature to better categorize your story is to create parts, divide your story and lump them according to which part they belong to, for instance, ‘Introduction’. There are two ‘Views’ that can be used to visualize your writing, one is ‘Chronological view’ wherein you can place your chapters according to their time line, and using a slider bar browse through them. In ‘Book view’ all your chapters are listed one after, the other, based on the chapter numbers.
The ‘Information’ side panel lets you access all the characters, locations and strands in your story and displays the ‘Quick Info’ properties of the selected element. Lastly, reports can be generated based on the information supplied. For instance, you can generate a report by filtering the character name, location, appearance of characters by date, the number of occurrences by character and location, and the usage statistics of strands.
After viewing these reports save them by exporting to them to a PNG image file. To avail of a different export file formats, go to ‘File > Export’, choose the report you want to export from the drop down list and save it as a text, PDF, HTML, CSV or RTF file. The reports that can be exported with this method are book summary, character and location list.
Thus, you don’t need to have StoryBook to manage you story, you can choose to export your information, and then uninstall it later. If you are afraid that you might loose information, simply ‘Backup’ this will store all your current files in a ZIP format and can be retrieved later if required. It is the best software which allows you to structure and manage your story.
Hello!
Well, I love this piece of software, it proves very useful for longer, complex stories. Especially for fantasy writing with lots of places and characters.
There is a problem I have however, and I’m not sure whether it’s me or the software. I can create locations, and place them in cities, but I can’t seem to write a description for a city. Likewise for countries. So usually I end up either creating notes for those things I can’t add to the location list, or I add the cities as locations, but that means every city appears twice: once for it’s own description with a blank “city” field, and once with all it’s sub-locations… Am I doing anything wrong, or is this feature just not available?
Thanks for this amazing piece of software!