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.

For more Mac news, visit Macworld. Story copyright Mac Publishing, LLC.