Hey everyone, I'm new here, so sorry if I posted this in the wrong place. I've tried writing novels a few times before, but I always failed because I never planned it out well enough, and I'm a very disorganized person. Recently I saw a video about articy:draft, which is a software for Game Design and Story Development for games. It manages everything from plot to each character and their choices. It helps you create the characters and events and even the environments and organize them. What I want to know is if there is something a lot like that, except for writers. Thanks in advance if you read this and reply.
I've never heard of it but a quick search shows me its really expensive, even more so than articy:draft. I'm on a pretty tight budget, being a teenager with no job. Thanks for taking the time to reply though.
The best planning tool costs pennies. Pen and paper. A little research online will give you information on novel structure and you can go from there. Writing a novel isn't like writing a game. It's just words. No real techie side. And there are plenty who eschew the idea of planning altogether as inorganic to the process. We call them pantsers.
You can get a demo version. You can't save anything, can't print anything, can't import/export anything, but you can explore the software. It comes with the "Dramatica Theory of Story" book in PDF format (4th Ed). Lots of academia. I prefer Truby's "Anatomy of Story" or McGee's "Story: Structure, Substance, etc." Hmmm...I looked up the Artsy:draft. It's 198 Euros, which is 272 US dollars. I think Dramatica is cheaper. Anyway, I find most computer game characters very one, maybe two dimensional, so you should pass on Artsy. I'd recommend some books to give you an idea of what should go into a character and story.
You don't need anything. You just need to be able to analyze stories and see how they work. That's the best learning and execution tool. But having said that, I find hero's journey to be a very good approximation of the process, and Kal Bashir's free YouTube videos are excellent.
Dear everyone. I am new to the forum, but I am facing the similar problem. I want to map my plot on the structure: having several timelines for each character, which show the events in their lives and then these events are linked together with the comments. XMind is pretty good (see attached) but it does not allow to have several main topics (yellow), since it is not designed for the writers. Characters need to be created as "floating topics" and it makes the resulting scheme too chaotic and hard to follow... An advice about the software I might use instead?
