Application assisted writing

A second vote for the glory, here. If you have the passion, go for it. That’s how Scrivener came to be.

Take a look at the heavyweights for perspective. Scrivener, Ulysses, heck, even Word.

I like Scrivener, but wish the styles were more traditional. I like Ulysses, but may be falling off that wagon, because I want to get my work archived in separate buckets, not everything stored in-app. It’s easy to get work out of Ulysses, less easy to get the metadata like notes.

Nisus is awesome, but I can’t find an iOS rtf editor that won’t dookey on Nisus’ styles.

Mellel is my current interest. There is a cutdown iPad version, styles in Mellel are actually stronger than Nisus, and there are neat features.

You can set story points, which are like bookmarks with tags, keywords, times, locations, and characters. You can then list the story points sorted however you want. It’s not a cork board, but it’s nice.

All in one tools like Scrivener are cool, but I like to pick the tools I want.

 

I'm confused by this. If you're talking about text styles, and things like indenting and paragraph spacing, you should be able to change them to whatever you want.

 

My ambiguity, my bad. The default "no style" concept in Scrivener is fine, it's just not to my taste. I would prefer to have an actual named style for everything, even if the entire document is just in the one style.

Compiling in Scrivener might be simpler if you just loaded a style library and used it. One style library for composing, and as many as you need for various output requirements.

 

Well, I do have one set of settings for composing, and a different one for output. And I've changed the default style for new documents. But, yes, I don't believe there's any way to name those styles.

 

Extraction of data wont be much of a problem, neither will metadata and notes. Putting it into a format other applications can use might be.

The idea is you can use however many tools and features you like, or none

That and similar tools, Story points would also work for selections of text.
Features similar to story points I've mentioned before.
I would also optionally organize the text into a tree type structure, or not at all, your choice.

I'll have to look at these applications for ideas and confirmation of what I plan and create a mock up

 

It occurs to me--and this is not helpful--that this would have been useful back when I was gamemastering my own tabletop roleplaying, using adventures that I'd written. In a situation where the players can to a large degree do what they please, you have to declare facts in the moment, and you don't get to edit or rewrite, it would be very useful to be able to say, "Aack! They're going to the gas station out of town? Who did I decide works there?"

The reason that's not helpful is that there were about ten people who might want it then, and, with online games taking over most of roleplaying, about three now.

 

Yes that's partly where the idea came from, basically anything involving a story not just writing literature

 

Mellel is really nice, but can’t export to docx or epub. That’s intended for a future release, but probably not real soon.

I had a few crashes in Nisus, but discovered that was from an issue with real time spellcheck. Turn that feature off, no crashes.

Mellel has an iOS app, Nisus will show a file in multiple tabs, windows, or editor splits. It doesn’t have story points, but I can link from a Nisus comment to a DEVONthink node, and from there I’ve got tagging and features in excess of what Mellel offers in its story points.

For now, I’m back home in Nisus. Nothing seems perfect - but Nisus’ implementation of styles is really close to it.

 

I'll just add my two cents: such an app would have to play nice with my method of backup. The second biggest reason I don't use Scrivener is that I've heard it doesn't always play nice with Dropbox, and you can pry my Dropbox out of my cold dead hands. (The first biggest reason I don't use Scrivener is the learning curve, and that's on me, so I won't say I'll never use Scrivener. I'll just need its compatibility issues with Dropbox fixed and the dev's signature on that fact in blood, please.)

I think while it's true each writer has their own method, there are probably patterns to be found, so if you're really serious about this it might be worth it to get a wide range of answers to this question. Ask on many different writing forums, and Nanowrimo when it's in season. It also might be worth it to simply ask people what their method of plotting is (and reminding them that even pantsers plot, they just do it later in the process). Get lots of data. Get a better idea of how the writing process works. Maybe try a plotting exercise yourself, just to see how it works. But as you seem to have already discovered, flexibility is going to be key.

For me, using an app to plot probably wouldn't help. When I'm plotting I either write in a physical notebook or a document, and when I get a new idea, whether about a potential scene, new character trait, or a plot element, I write it down after the last thing I wrote. Yes, it's all jumbled together, but trying to categorize a note like 'he tells her about her missing memories because he feels sorry for her' is a nightmare. It's the bare bones structure of a scene, but it's also a change to his character, which wasn't sympathetic before. It's also about her- the point in the story when she finally starts to fill in the missing memories. What label do you put on that? Whereas in my method, I just know that it was written after a note about why he kidnaps her, at a point when I thought he was just a goon following orders, and because this new note is chronologically after the previous one, it takes priority. And that's just a little, one-sentence note. I will ramble for pages about character motivations and how those will play out in scenes and impact other character's arcs, and the idea of tagging every single note with all its attributes makes my eyes cross.

I can see where an app might help me, if I went through the learning curve to change my method to suit it, but as right now I'm not willing to do that.

I find your drive to tackle a puzzle like this admirable! Good luck to you!