Novel

Novel is where you start writing, beginning with Chapter 1—as good a place to start as any. Most writers have a solid idea where they want to begin, even though they’ll probably cut it later on. So far, not really anything beyond what you can do with a word processor.

Scenes

Scenes is a great place to write the pivotal parts of your work as they come to you. Let’s say you’ve got a first act climax, or an interesting plot twist. You’re not sure how to get there, but why wait? Get it out now and find the right place for it later.

A List of Scenes

StoryMill’s greatest strength is its scenes-based approach to writing. Writing chapter-by-chapter can force you into an overly chronological approach. I know this from personal experience: the first draft of my first manuscript is chronological and chapter-based. I’m not sure if I could have told this story any other way, but looking back I wish I’d had the flexibility to try. Some of the edits and revisions I’m now considering might have come to me more quickly in a scenes-based approach.

Characters

Characters is where you keep your characters. What they look like, their backgrounds, motivations, all that backstory stuff that you started to put in Chapter One until you realized that you were thirty pages in and nothing had happened yet. Your reader doesn’t need all this information up front, but you do. This is where you keep it until you’re ready to reveal little by little.

A Sample Character

Locations

Locations are the setting for your scenes. Here, for example, you can put in all the architectural details of a building without revealing them on page one (boring). Again, what you need to know to write isn’t necessarily what reader needs to know to read (yet).

A Sample Location

Tasks

Tasks is a generic tag—kind of a catch-all. You can delete this if you want or make other tags to keep track of things outside the basic categories provided in the template.

Research

Here’s where you keep all the information that keeps your story “true to life.” Someday (we hope) you’ll be reading your book at a big book signing event. The last thing you need is a self-proclaimed expert questioning you on the breeding and training of quarter-horses, or the fatality rate of American test pilots in the 1950s, or how many bishops attended the First Council of Nicea. No fact is too obscure for some know-it-all to correct, but you can be prepared. Just make sure that any references you find in Wikipedia are properly sourced.

Sample Research

Submissions

Submissions (as stated earlier) is where you track submissions of your completed and thoroughly edited manuscript to agents and editors. This is also a good place to store contact information prior to submitting, and you can export entries to Address Book to print mailing labels.

A Sample Submission Contact

Menu options in each window allow you to interconnect characters, scenes, and locations by storyline as well set a draft status (e.g. first, second, needs work, final). These draft statuses can be edited in Preferences.

Insert

Insert adds a new submenu to the selected menu item on the left. Here’s an easy place to add new scenes, characters, or locations. Another way to do this is by “right-clicking” the menu item, or by selecting the “Add a New _” button at the top of the open window.

Snapshots

Snapshots is a useful editing feature. You can save any scene as a snapshot, and then compare original and revised scenes side-by-side in a single window. (I’ve done this with two open windows in Word—it’s a real pain).

How Dare I Correct Robert Louis Stevenson?

Full Screen

Full screen toggles the view to text only. Select this option if you want to write without on-screen distractions. The Esc key toggles back. The only problem I had with this feature is that, every time I toggled, the cursor jumped back to the beginning of the text. A minor annoyance, but one that should be easily fixed in an update.

Writing in Full-screen Mode

Timeline

The timeline lets you lay out your entire story chronologically, with overlapping subplots on separate lines. Coming from a music recording background, I love timelines—I sketch them out on big sheets of paper laid out on the floor. The timeline is scalable from hours to centuries—a good feature for stories that vary their treatment of time. Managing a complex timeline can be tricky, though, if, for example, you have one scene that takes place in an hour occurring in the same time frame as a broad setting or transition scene that covers several months. After a while, my eyes started to bug out a bit as I scrolled and scrolled to get to the point where the two overlapped. I’m not sure how to fix this; it may just be a shortcoming of any timeline layout.

A Sample Timeline

Progress Meter

Next to the timeline is the progress meter. I love this. It’s like a less threatening version of Write or Die. Every writer needs to set a goal, or nothing gets done, and having an easy way to set a word limit—“I will write 1,000 words on this scene today if it kills me!”—is a good way to keep from getting distracted from wasting too much time on character traits, setting details, research minutiae, and any other self-imposed distractions that keep us from doing what we’re supposed to be doing: writing.

Keep Writing!

Etc.

To the right of the progress meter are four more handy tools: Annotate, Jump To, Highlight, and Search. Annotate lets you insert a hyperlink to an annotation; Jump To, as expected, jumps to the next annotation; Highlight and Search are self-explanatory.