Nothing is better than wasting time on a Friday night after work by browsing for new online courses, books, games, and software I'll never get to. Today it was software on the time-wasting roulette.
My first story was written using Bibisco free edition. There's nothing wrong with Bibisco itself; I really liked how it had sections just for defining characters, scenes, and other story elements.
However, the way it creates "scenes" as parts of chapters without any way to see the chapter in its entirety makes uploading chapters to websites a total pain. I ended up going through each scene and copy pasting them individually. There's also the option of exporting the entire project/story into a PDF, but that's just as annoying. If there was a program that was more upload friendly, I'd switch.
So today I ended up looking into another options, and voila, introducing Dramatica, which advertised itself as being able to help develop parts of your story that don't exist by analyzing the parts you feed into it. Also, just look at those screenshots! Charts! Spreadsheets! WORDSSS! I had to at least give it a try.
First impression: wow, the installer for Dramatica on Windows is only 10MB?? All that advanced tech for 10MB?? (Installed, it's 20MB.)
The second impression: no wonder it was 20BM, and they showcased the program using the Mac version, which is slightly more advanced. They even have a small print "Dramatica Pro for Windows not pictured" right at the bottom of their Hamlet picture! The Windows version will give you the complete Win95 aesthetic and user experience. It's so bad.
Not pictured above: this is a window widget within a window. Yes, it's one of those programs.
Disregarding the awful graphics, overall, I am impressed by how thorough the program is. If you hit the StoryGuide, it introduces the function by saying it will "handhold" you through creating your first outline of a story. It isn't kidding.
Literally more questions on this than my entire Reading/Writing/Math SATs.
Since I wasn't planning to write a full production novel right there, I decided to chug in some information based on the really short 3k fanfic I wrote. For the lulz, just to see what the analysis engine can tell me about the story that I didn't know about.
This is another window, by the way. Also, my eyes aren't very good to begin with, so I'm just dying on the inside while chugging through this.
Here, have, by far, the worst font experience in the program.
Also, notice the Storyforms and progress bars on the bottom left. I believe at the start, there are 2^15 = 32768 different storyforms. The more information you put in and choose how characters react/change in the story, you get fewer storyforms. As Shang says in Mulan, "We have a long way to go." I am on Part 2 of the StoryGuide in that screenshot, look how little progress was made!
This program is absolutely a labor of love. Going through the entire thing while digesting all the information given in Explain/Theory/Usage/Context tabs is probably worth at least one college level writing class. It even gives you examples of real media to illustrate how the question should be questioned.
At the end of Part 2 I probably wrote more words into the StoryGuide than my actual fanfic, so I decided to stop lollygagging and skip through most of Part 3. Part 3 was allllllll writing and probably the meat of the StoryGuide.
At the end, put in enough information and you'll eventually congratulated on being able to get one storyform down. (If there was a place in the program that showed you exactly what the storyform is, I couldn't find it.)
I went on to check what I consider the "analysis" portion of the program. (I do have screenshots but since they contains revealing information about what series my fanfic is from, I won't share them.) Some of the analysis, like overall story order and audience story points, read like horoscopes. They sounded kind of correct, and a few were completely on point. We'll never know whether the analysis is a broken clock right twice a day or just useless, since I skipped filling in the most important parts of the StoryGuide.
Overall, I can see myself willing to use this if I needed to plan out a very long story, but this is way too much effort for a short story to be worth it. Very good writers are probably able to do most of the planning internally or already have a system for organizing their information, and Dramatica breaks it down into many small steps for those who don't know what they're doing.
tl;dr I can't believe I spent an hour on this. Time to give Scrivener a try.