The project window is where youʼll be spending most of your time in StoryMill. The main project window and general terms Scroll through, review your narrative flow, and admire your work! StoryMillʼs novel view allows you to see your entire story from start to finish as it will appear to your reader, with alternating chapters displaying a light background color.
While scenes are a key organizational component of StoryMill, the chapters are how your readers will eventually see your story organized.Ĭhapters then make up your story. Once you capture your ideas as scenes, then you can get creative again deciding how you want to arrange them. Approaching your story this way allows you to develop it in a non-linear fashion. So, first jot down the scene youʼre thinking of - and then decide later how you want to integrate it into your story. You canʼt control when your creative juices will run - but you can control how you organize them. Think about scenes as discrete ideas that you can quickly capture - and organize later. There is the text that makes up the scene, but the program also recognizes that there are characters (the actors in the story), a location (the setting), and other information, such as notes, that you as the author can manage. A scene is a smaller part of the overall story that may be demarcated by time, setting, or content.
StoryMill takes scenes as the basic building blocks of writing.
#Mac os app storymill how to
In order to help you jump straight into writing, this chapter introduces the basic interface and concepts behind StoryMill and describes how to add, edit, and delete any item in your project.īefore you can effectively make use of StoryMill, you need to understand the concepts it is organized around.
#Mac os app storymill for mac os
Built from the ground up for Mac OS X, StoryMill offers an innovative way to channel and fine tune the creative writing process.Īlthough StoryMill provides an impressive array of features to help you write and track the details of your story more effectively, none of them are required! StoryMill is incredibly flexible: it can simply be a no-nonsense place to write and revise using its distraction-free full screen and powerful annotations, or a complete database of every character, location, and scene that makes up your novel.
#Mac os app storymill professional
StoryMill introduces aspiring authors to multi-level writing methods of tracking characters, scenes, and locations, while professional writers will appreciate StoryMill's time-saving ability to oversee and manage the full creative process with Smart Views. In addition, Mariner Software’s customer service was prompt and helpful, and seemed receptive to user suggestions for future improvements, of which I have two.Welcome to StoryMill! Part word processor, part database, StoryMill 4.0 provides every author with the tools essential to writing a best seller: everything from project-wide annotations to centuries-spanning timelines. In addition, StoryMill’s full-screen mode helps those of us with electronic ADD focus on getting ideas on the page by hiding the game icons and Web shortcuts that are far too tempting to click when the words aren’t coming.ĭuring my evaluation, I found StoryMill 3.1 to be both stable and speedy. StoryMill’s Progress Meter lets me set a per-session word count goal, and shows me how much longer I need to slug it out at the keyboard before I can slug it out at the corner bar Bukowski-style. For me, writing is like exercise it feels good when I finish, but I can never finish soon enough. If it’s bells and whistles that put a smile on your face, StoryMill 3.1 won’t disappoint. Why is this important? To take advantage of some of StoryMill’s more powerful nonlinear features, you really need to divide your novel into its constituent chunks. On import, the program does an admirable job at recognizing chapter breaks, as demonstrated by a quick import of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. rtf and Microsoft Word (.doc) documents, a capability whose absence may have turned people off to previous versions of the software. 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.Īnother long-awaited feature is the ability to import. Novelists have always enjoyed playing with time, bouncing back and forth from past to present, story line A to story line Z. The most exciting addition to StoryMill 3.1 is the Timeline tool.
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