100 Sites for Fiction Writers: #85 - Storybook

This is an ongoing series looking at websites that can be of help to fiction writers with their craft and career.

Storybook

Though this series has been about websites useful for fiction writers, here I'm taking a bit of a left turn. Storybook is sort of a website, but not really. Actually what it is is software that can help fiction writers structure their plots. In other words, its outlining software. But it's more than that.

Storybook allows writers to keep track of scenes, what goes on within those scenes, which characters appear in the scenes, etc. For writers who like to outline, or think they should be outlining because they have difficulty keeping track of all this information in their head, the Storybook software might be right.

What's best is that the basic version of Storybook is free. If you want the extra features offered in Storybook Pro, the cost is less than $30 as of this writing.

Storybook Pro allows you to do a few extra things, come nice touches, not available in the more basic version of the software. For one thing, extensive charts and graphs are available to help writers make better sense of what's going on within their stories. Storybook Pro also allows you to work offline with the software, so you don't have to be plugged into the Internet. With Storybook Pro, you can also download all files as plain text, which makes it available to do much of your writing right in Storybook Pro.

Obviously this type of software isn't for everyone. Some writers are lucky enough to keep track of everything in their head. But many prefer to outline, especially when working on longer, more complex projects like novels or screenplays. For those writers, Storybook or Storybook Pro are gold.