Novel management software - what should it do?

So I'm currently writing a project using yWriter, and that's helping me keep scenes organised and revised. However, it feels a bit limited, and there are some things I'd like that it doesn't do. So, since I am also a software developer, I decided to try building my own.

However, I'd like to avoid dooming it myself, since it feels almost a waste of time, so I thought I'd ask you what you'd like to see in such a piece of software. (I don't have a list of features I want to see yet, since I'm still writing it, but I might post one tomorrow.)

I'd be releasing the project as open source, unlike the likes of Scrivener, so even if I don't implement what you ask, we can (hopefully) get a useful piece of software out at the end of the day.

So, what parts of world-building and/or writing a novel would you like to be done automatically? (Apart from the writing. I can't automate that.)

edited 20th Sep '12 6:37:27 PM by Yej

I like a lot of what Storybook has:

The scenes (and the ability to flag them as "informational" so the background stuff you write doesn't get included in the work), especially how you can quickly create on and you don't have to put it anywhere in particular, just get the writing down as and when you think of it to organise later. The fixed dates and relative-to-other scenes dates.

Items, with the ability to assign them to characters and/or locations and tie the allocation to a scene (so you can track the ownership/location of the item across the course of the story. The ability to assign the same item to multiple characters/locations is great.

Tags that can be used to attach whatever labels you want to characters and/or locations and (again) tie the tag to a scene.

The ability to insert pictures into descriptions and notes for characters, locations and items.

User-definable categories for characters in addition to the defaults (Major/Minor).

User-definable attributes for the characters.

Good as it is, it does have limitations and there are other things I'd like to see in a piece of Novel Management software:

Tabs in the Character profile that show what tags/items (perhaps even scenes and locations) apply to that character. Automatically populated: once you've assigned an item to a character, it shows up in the character's "ITEMS" tab as their inventory.

Having tried the demo of Write It Now, I'd like to see these features:

A "Family Relationships" tab for characters - with some predefined basics (father, mother, son, daughter, spouse etc) and the ability to define more.

Unlike in Write It Now, this should be automatically reciprocal - creating a relationship automatically flags siblings and half siblings, uncle/aunt/niece/nephew etc as appropriate and updates those characters' relationship tables). e.g. On Bill's tab, select "Father of" and then one of the other characters. That character then automatically gets "Son of Bill". (s)he also gets "brother/sister of" whoever else has been flagged as a child of Bill.

Like Write It Now, the ability to add custom relationships (lover, de facto, divorced from etc), as above, this should preferrably include the ability create reciprocal relationships (A is this to B, what is B to A?)) so that the other character's status is automatically update as per the default relationships.

In keeping with the tags, items etc, these relationships should be able to be tied to a date or scene.

An "Interpersonal Relationships" tab for characters - to record feelings towards others (love, hate, admire etc.)

An "Other Relationships" tab for characters - to record what they feel about/do with items (covet, seek, uses etc)

One of the things I find about Storybook is that if you want to assign things (tags, items) to multiple characters or locations, the assignment process is cumbersome, forcing you to go through the procedure for each and every person to whom the tag/item applies.

I'd like the ability to quickly apply tags etc to lots of characters e.g. if you have a "Smith Family" tag, the ability to select all the characters that apply in one go ("Ctrl-click" and "Shift-click" for preference) or at least quickly drag and drop characters to the tag or vice versa. Even a Checkbox option like when adding characters to a scene would be good. Could select a default Start/End scene to apply to all selected then go through the list and alter any if required.

If you're not familiar with Storybook and Write It Now, I suggest downloading them and having a look so you've got an idea of what I'm blathering about.

I'd happily Beta-test your program for you.

Best of luck with the project.

Timeline organisers. Lines where you can attach dates/relative time markers, and then add notes or attach scenes/chapters/books/whatever to different points on the timeline. Since these can be more important with parallel stories, multiple characters, and nonlinear time, possibly the ability to split said timeline into branches and rejoin them at later points, running multiple timelines alongside each other on the same page, and/or being able to connect multiple timelines?

And the ability to attach sticky notes to various scenes for stuff like declaring the purpose of the scene or notes to your future editing self, I guess.

edited 20th Sep '12 8:09:42 PM by greedling

The ability to customize dates would be useful for specfic writers, but I understand that that would be a bitch to code.

Rainlander isn't a writing program but it might help with customizing dates.

How's this project coming along?

I'd really like to see it.

Sorry, Real Life work got in the way.

However, I did have some ideas:

1. Scenes work like they do in pretty much any other such manager (they have an order, a date/time*
   The dates don't necessarily match the order to be printed in
   , starring characters, a POV, etc) apart from one thing: there are multiple revisions - blocks of text - associated with the one scene, so you don't need to set up all the metadata every time you say, "This isn't working, let's start this bit again." Some scenes can also be "informational" - when the whole project is assembled into a manuscript, these aren't included.
2. Characters also have the standard metadata, (names, birthdates, a "scene", as above, of their biography, etc) however, they also have tags between characters. These are just arbitrary associations, defining relationships between two characters. They can be attached to specific scenes, and be turned on/off by those scenes. (Relationship Tropes are ideally suited for this. ) Then, the program can show you the relationships between all the characters during any given point of the story.

edited 10th Nov '12 6:26:44 AM by Yej

That sounds a great start already.

Relationships can be very dynamic throughout the course of the story and the means to tie characters together in a traceable, flexible manner is very important - I'm surprised that Storybook doesn't do that, given its other great abilities.

Storybook's tags don't quite cut it. For example, you can't have five different tags called "married" with five different pairs of characters assigned to those tags. And one tag called "married" with ten married people in it doesn't exactly clarify who is married to whom.

So I've got tags called "Bill's spouse", "Mary's spouse" etc with relevant people assigned to the tags.

All good until I change Bill or Mary's name mid way through the story (what sort of lame name is Bill, anyway? ) - all things linked to that person get the updated name change but the tag is still called "Bill's spouse" untiil I remember to manually change it.

Then you get the oddball relationships that go on in my story where one person may well have multiple concurrent partners.

edited 9th Nov '12 6:44:55 PM by Wolf1066