Do you have the right writing wheels?

I was asked in a recent dev editing course if there was an easy way to move scenes and chapters around. It made me blink. The answer, “yes, you just have to drag and reshuffle them in the left nav,” was almost out of my mouth when I realized the writer was using Word. This started an interesting discussion.

I write with Scrivener. I am very very bad at Scrivener. It’s rather like having a Ferrari and never getting it out of second gear. So when somebody else in the same class said, “Don’t tell me to use Scrivener, I don’t have the time to learn,” I knew exactly what they meant. Obviously, I’ve never found time to learn how to put the vehicle into third. So, I sympathize!

However, I also know that half the work I did on my recent edit of The Chinese Wife, and half the work I’m doing now on a bones-up rewrite of Seattle’s Daughter, could not be done in Word. Not without so much frustration that I would have convinced myself the novels were fine as is. Instead, because of the ease and power provided by Scrivener, I moved scenes. I moved chapters. Importantly, I merged scenes into beats so that I could go back and edit each lump into appropriate beat length, no matter how many scenes I’d stuffed that beat with. How would one even approach such work in Word or Pages where there is only a single continuous document?

All this was fresh in my mind when an invitation arrived to test drive another writing app: The Novel Factory. I was immediately impressed. Whereas Word, Pages, and even Scrivener are passive writing apps — you have to come to them knowing how you want to write, and how you want to organize — The Novel Factory is a writing app with prompts. You can use its many features ad hoc, in any way you want, à la Scrivener, or you can follow its suggested steps and be guided through the writing of a novel — premise, synopsis, plot, subplots, character development, you name it — with templates specific to the genre you’re writing in. It is almost as if the wish lists of the students in my dev editing class somehow morphed into an app.

I tried re-plotting Seattle’s Daughter using the Novel Factory’s “Character Driven” plot template and it a) immediately showed me in high relief where my plot was out of step and dragging; b) threw up some “new out of the box” glitches in the software. But it changed the way I saw my novel and that was worth swearing once or twice at the tech.

If you want to take a closer look yourself, register below for a promo code that will enable you to test drive the Novel Factory for a month. Another great plus the Novel Factory has over Scrivener is that it’s very intuitive. I think even those who don’t have time to learn Scrivener will find this easy peasy.

In fact, it’s so intuitive—so close to being a “how to write a novel” workbook—that I wondered if there was a writer behind it. And there is! In addition to being software designer, entrepreneur, and, if you think of it, writing instructor, Katja Kaine is an award-winning writer of MG/YA fantasy.

Doesn’t she sound interesting? Wouldn’t you love to ask her where her genre-specific templates come from, or what she thinks are the pros and cons of having such a structured approach to writing? I would. I will. And you can. I will be chatting with Katja in a Zoom interview of Thursday, September 8th. Because of the time difference, this will not be in our regular slot of 5:30pm. We’ll be chatting bright and early at 9:00am. If you’d like to talk to someone who wrote not a book but a platform on how to write, please register using the form below. For everyone else, this interview will be recorded. I hope to see some of you there live, though!