Tuesday 12 October 2004

Pic of the day: New and prettier external hard disk (300GB, silver-colored case). 200 GB of family friendly anime lost. But who cares about that now? I found this cute program ...

Power Writer

It was hard to choose a color for this entry. I considered blue, but this is not a game, and not even meant to be fun. But it is fun, at least for a creative writer such as I. I think I am infatuated. As Allison Grace put it: Infatuation is not love, but the expectation that our future will be improved.

The future, if any, arrives in November. That is the annual NaNoWriMo -- national novel writing month. And it was on the NaNoWriMo forum I found a mention of Power Writer, under a thread about plotting software. Which ironically it is not, not really. Power Writer is a decent Windows word processor with built-in tools for writing fiction, especially novels.

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The largest window of the program is a pretty standard word processor, similar to Wordpad but slower. In that respect, it is similar to MS Word. But instead of a multitude of tools for tables, columns, embedded images and other desktop publishing features, it has tools for keeping track of plot points, characters and research notes.

On the left is an optional outline of the book divided by act (or arc as I call them - you can rename any term you want), chapter and plot point. Plot points are of course invisible to the reader, but visible in this program. Think of them as micro chapters. You can give them descriptive names, like "Harry meets Sally" or "Foreshadowing Hermione's suicide". You can attach icons or colors to remind you of the type and tone of the plot point, or you can use them to jump directly to a part of the plot. And of course you can move a plot point as a unit, but I would be careful about that unless you write in a very modular way.

Under the main window is the research / story tools window. This is where you keep track of your characters, from their names and looks to their greatest fears and dirty secrets. None of this prints with the novel, so their secrets remain safe with you. This part also lets you define your goals for each arc, chapter and plot point. There is even a to-do list, where you can set goals that must be met within a specific arc or chapter, then you can later check where they have been met.

You can write general notes about the novel, or tie a note to a particular text, or embed a note in your writing that no one else will see. Ideal for unstructured writers who suddenly get a great idea about something else than what they are writing about.

Writer's Block typically manifests because you come to some point in your narrative where you get stuck. With Power Writer, you will create a plot point or chapter and define what needs to happen here to bring the story further. Then you do something else, whether it is writing the final scene or the third scene before the final, or fleshing out characters, or writing a page about the nature and causes of cats even though none of them appear in your story.

The point is, with Power Writer you can always keep writing. It certainly does not guarantee a good result. It even encourages a modular thinking that could hamper the flow of the text and create coffee break points if you lean on it too heavily. But you can always write. No plot? No problem! You can still write. Perhaps another day you will go through your text and identify plot points; but if you don't feel the need, no one needs ever know. And you still have the tools to make sure Tom has the same eye color throughout the book and is not called Nick in the dramatic final scene, not to mention that Christmas is not called Charleytmas in chapters 7 & 8.

Beside the more technical tools, you can optionally let the program interview you about things like "how does this scene move the story forward", "what did Ben learn in this chapter", and not least "what about the end of this chapter makes the reader want to move on to the next?" None of these directly increase your word count, but they help you see the story from new angles. So perhaps you decide to not after all end the chapter with both boys rolling over and snoring, because the reader would probably do likewise.

Even so, when all is said and done, Power Writer is a word processor at heart. It won't create a novel if all you know is typing. But it will help you keep typing when you would normally try to out-stare a blank page, and that is no small feat.

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On the subject of typing, not all of us can easily do that. How does Power Writer handle voice input or text transfer from other sources?

Power Writer suffers from the same problem as most text processors and web forms as well: They grab your text. If you dictate a line and need to edit it, you must use the tools of the word processor rather than the tools of the speech recognition software. This is bad, because the speech recognition program works with phrases rather than letters.

A normal typo is just one letter, but a mishearing can totally alter the meaning at any point in the sentence. Let us say I dictate "She stopped and caught her breath.'' The machine hears "She stopped and fought her breast." At the end of the paragraph I discover the mistake. In Notepad, I can select "fought" and NaturallySpeaking will remember the alternatives it considered and list them, including "caught" which I choose. I can do this with pointing device or voice (''select fought, choose 2" for instance). But with Word, OpenOffice or Power Writer, I have to edit the actual letters as if I had written them.

One solution is to dictate in Notepad or Dragonpad, then select all and paste that to PW. Power Writer handles pasted text as if typed, and you can easily assign blocks of text to different roles such as notes or plot points. Still, working with two different programs kinda negates the point of an integrated writing environment.

Another approach is to speak clearly and hope for the best. Last year that would have been a pretty hopeless project due to the error rate. But with the new Plantronics USB headset combined with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7.0, the error rate is much reduced. I still speak to my machine almost daily, training it as well a myself. And a novel is generally simpler than my journal. Hopefully the free upgrade to NaturallySpeaking 7.3 will do nothing but good too.

We'll have to see. Half a month is still an ocean of time. I really ought not to get into the fad this early; but with software like this, how could I avoid it?