As a distraction, I’ve been playing with the demo of Storyist, testing out the integration between the desktop app (which has a hefty price tag I haven’t quite committed to yet) and the iPad application.
Storyist isn’t as feature rich or easy to use as Scrivener – what is? It has a basic manuscript mode, which took some getting used to. Although visually in the sidebar it presents the text as discrete blocks, like Scrivener does, in the main editing area its all really just one large document per chapter. This can be a little disconcerting since if you’ve started outlining, you have a large block of #’s without being able to tell where you are in the text. Maybe there’s a setting that I haven’t found, or that isn’t in the demo, that addresses this, but a bit annoying. The notecard (“storyboard”) and outline functions seem pretty straightforward, and I have to concede I prefer the way Storyist presents the group of notecards. One of the benefits is supposed to be the way the different sheets (character sheets, plot sheets, setting sheets, etc.) integrate with each other and let you link against parts of the manuscript, but its not something that’s completely won me over yet.
The seamless integration with the iPad app, which has the same features (note cards, outline mode, manuscript mode, etc.), however, is really rather enticing. Scrivener, as wonderful as it is, is going on year three of promising to have an iPad app without any sign of a real delivery.
I’m still on the fence between shelling out the money for a new program and waiting, but it’s good to know there is a viable alternative out there. And I know, not a bit of this adds words to the page as far as actually writing, but we all procrastinate in our own ways.
Related articles
- Exploring Storyist (fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com)
- Storyist, Plus Writing About a Vietnamese-American Proto-Detective (spontaneousderivation.com)
- Review: Can Storyist Software Help You Get Your Script or Novel Idea Ready to Sell? (scriptmag.com)
