StoryMill 3.1

Some tasks seem impossible in their scale. Climbing Everest. Running a marathon. Writing a novel. Thanks to Mariner Software's StoryMill 3.1, aspiring authors need not be intimidated any longer. In breaking up this daunting task by focusing on scenes--the individual building blocks of fiction--and providing a framework for capturing all of a writer's research, ideas, and pages in a single document, StoryMill's hybrid word processor/database approach gives today's newbie novelist a significant leg up. Just add talent, dedication, and insight into the human spirit.

When most people think of a novel, they think of a pocket paperback, not the thousands of sticky notes, index cards, and legal pad--scribblings that fill the shoeboxes that fill the shelves that fill their authors' closets. StoryMill (called Avenir, prior to version 3.0) provides the structure for not only capturing all these musings, but for linking them together and building upon them until they crystallize into a story.

In a word processing application, your novel might typically appear as several hundred pages of continuous text--unwieldy, slow to repaginate, and tough to navigate. StoryMill approaches your novel as a collection of hundreds of discrete scenes. In turn, these scenes can be grouped into chapters, tagged with annotations, reordered, and filtered. The result is a very nimble program with powerful features hidden behind a clean and easy-to-use interface.

StoryMill's "smart views" largely eliminate the need to rifle through reams of pages or screen-scroll for what seems like forever during rewriting. Instead, you can instantly filter and display scenes, by character, location, and even draft status. But the real power comes with clever use of author-assigned metadata tags that enable you to create a smart view that will display literally whatever you want.

The most exciting addition to StoryMill 3.1 is the Timeline tool. Novelists have always enjoyed playing with time, bouncing back and forth from past to present, story line A to story line Z. If your plots tend toward the tangled, you'll love the timeline feature, which enables you to manipulate your story lines in chronological order, regardless of the order in which the narrative is revealed to the reader.

Another long-awaited feature is the ability to import .rtf and Microsoft Word (.doc) documents, a capability whose absence may have turned people off to previous versions of the software. On import, the program does an admirable job at recognizing chapter breaks, as demonstrated by a quick import of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. Why is this important? To take advantage of some of StoryMill's more powerful nonlinear features, you really need to divide your novel into its constituent chunks.

If it's bells and whistles that put a smile on your face, StoryMill 3.1 won't disappoint. For me, writing is like exercise; it feels good when I finish, but I can never finish soon enough. StoryMill's Progress Meter lets me set a per-session word count goal, and shows me how much longer I need to slug it out at the keyboard before I can slug it out at the corner bar Bukowski-style. In addition, StoryMill's full-screen mode helps those of us with electronic ADD focus on getting ideas on the page by hiding the game icons and Web shortcuts that are far too tempting to click when the words aren't coming.

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