Jan 23 2009
Does NewNovelist software help writers?
Some time ago I bought novel writing software: NewNovelist . I thought it might help; I’m not sure if it has. I have tried to write novels both with and without it since that time, and I’m not published yet. 
One of the things that NewNovelist provides the writer is a number of significant generic outlines for your novel depending on the type of story it is. When you start a new novel, it asks you to pick one. This outline gives you a number of steps or stages to your story, explains what each step is and often gives an example from well-known fiction. You then just fill in the steps with your story.
But it is far more flexible than that. You can also add your own steps, delete the ones they provide (for the novel you are writing, the steps are still there for future novels) and you can very easily change the order of the chapters.
The big drawback, however, is that NewNovelist doesn’t have a word count function. This is a very big flaw. How do you know when you are done when you don’t know how far you have come?
But the flexibility of NewNovelist is rather good for the kind of stories I tend to write. My current work, Kolbe’s World, is being written on NewNovelist. It starts out with one character, Kolbe, abandoned for years on a lifeless planet, and you learn about his daily life, his backstory, and the planet. This section ends when a spaceship lands, Kolbe observes the goings-on, and finally Kolbe meets one of the people, Greta Sauerling. The next section tells more of Greta’s story, and a further section tells about Han Minho, the leader of the planetary settlement.
By using NewNovelist, I can set up all these different sections and write them as I feel inspired by the main characters of the section, rather than in the order they appear in the story. I can also change the sections of the story around later if I want to. I also have a short chapter that goes at the beginning which I’m just not in the mood to write right now.
The software also helps you develop your characters, but I haven’t used that part of it much and don’t intend to use it at all in the future. That’s not the part of writing I have a problem with.
So— at this point I haven’t totally given up on the idea that the NewNovelist software will help me in my writing. Whether it will help any other writer I don’t know. Since I have Asperger’s syndrome (a form of autism), my mind doesn’t work the way the minds of normal people work, and so I can’t predict whether it would help a normal writer. But it’s fairly cheap software and might be worth a try. You can read the details of it at the company web site and see if you think it might be right for you.
http://www.newnovelist.com/overview.html
If you have used NewNovelist software, please leave a comment about your experiences with it, thanks.
