Storyist
Storyist Software
$59, available via Amazon.com, downloadable from the Storyist.com site
Compatible with Snow Leopard and older Mac systems
Storytelling software is not word processing. Microsoft made a fortune from Microsoft Word, but a writer who wants to tell a story will want more than the super-formatter from Microsoft brings to their screen. The Mac and storytelling have always been a close fit. Novelists use it, screenwriters even more so. If you’ve got an extensive business report or an article to compose, this is the kind of tool that can help your business. How close your work habits match a tool like Storyist will determine how much help such this software can deliver.
Storyist has been around for more than two years, and I’ve aimed my work at it through several versions. I got excited about the 2.0 release when I saw creator Steve Shepard demonstrate it at the 2009 Macworld Expo. A few months later a shipping version arrived (a license-free review copy.) I’ve spent time trying to slip my chapters of a new novel into what looks like a handsome template.
What follows will lead you into the details of startup, something a writer with experience in submission formats cares about. This kind of software tool is as personal as a barber or a massage artist. You try candidates until you feel the fit. While I waited on the 2.0 Storyist, I poured a 300-page novel into the competing Scrivener, from Literature and Latte. The latter program was the first I managed to fit around the massive body of my work.
So I had a standard to compare with Storyist. But the disadvantage any competitor brings are also its distinctions. “This is the way we do it,” Storyist says while I push words, sections, and chapters into it. Like understanding the difference between Swedish and Shiatsu massage, getting comfy with this program’s style was my first step in the road to crafting a story with Storyist. But the program is very big on pre-planning. Novelists call these distinctions “plotters” versus “pantsers” (as in by-the-seat-of).
I wish some of Storyist fundamentals didn’t need me to belt up my pants so early on. When I type a tab in a creative writing tool, I expect an indent — not a beep that rolls you into a menu of styles. That feels like a screenwriting choice, and I wanted to be able to keep my manuscript drafting simple. Storyist’s defaults and styles need to be scrutinized before your storytelling can begin.For example, Storyist’s template for a Novel gives you placeholder instructions (A Getting Started Guide) on how to format a manuscript. Then its says “hit Command-A and delete” and get started. I got started by wondering where my chapters just disappeared to. This newbie went to start a new project, read the included dummy text, then hit the Cmd-A key and delete. I was left looking at a blank page in text window without even a page number until I scrolled up. Along the way I noticed I had four pages in my new chapter, which seemed a bit odd, since I’d created nothing yet.
Developer Steve Shepard disagrees, but Storyist appeared as if its default is for composing screenplays. In the help text for Editing Project Item Preferences, Editing Mode help started right off like this:
1. Screenplay—Used for screenplays and stage plays.
The docs then go on to detail all the elements “like scene intros, locations, times, characters, extensions, and transitions.”) Hey, I chose the Novel template. Why are the program’s default preferences for screenplays?
I found the in-program startup instruction missing a key step, and so forth. The beta testers on the Storyist forum find the documentation “pretty good,” although one said that “as intuitive as Storyist is, ‘Kind of confused…’ is not a unique situation.” He did go on to praise the current version now in beta-test as “brilliant.”
Steven Sande, another reviewer who praised the product at The Unofficial Apple Blog, had a similar first encounter.
The reason it took me so long to write the review is that Storyist works differently from my brain, and it took me a while to get used to it as a tool. Every writer has his or her own particular style of writing, and I find that pre-planning the writing process just doesn’t work very well for me. I prefer to jump in and start writing, but want a way to capture important information about characters, settings, and plot points so I can refer to them later. Storyist can also be used for this method of writing, so I found it to be more useful to me after learning how to navigate its many features.
Storyist’s Manual options
I found enthusiastic and exacting help and answers, beyond the manual and help files, on Storyist’s registration-required Forum, which helped me kick-start Storyist for writing a novel. (Your task might be a report, or an article. You get the point.) Forum postings are an unusual training experience for me. Storyist’s startup may be more intuitive for screenwriters, or anybody who loves using styles while they compose. But my Mac experience doesn’t usually lead to a forum to untangle early attempts to create with a program. Could this documentation be a roadblock to the many users who need General Editing Mode, or haven’t the time to wait for a board reply or e-mail? It was for me.
I won’t be recommending Storyist’s documentation. Subscribing to the user forum should be a part of program installation. I’m told there are novelists who jumped right in and started composing, hitting their Tab key and loving that those styles, including screenplay transition formats, popped right up. And while there are writers out there who still adore Courier as a default font, even the most prolific beta tester found it antique. “There is no real reason, in the 21st Century, to insist that a manuscript look like it had been typed on a typewriter,” one said. Create a novel of above 80,000 words and you’ll be submitting a two-box manuscript. Nobody will even open those in an agent’s office today.
There’s so much that’s right with this program, like its writing session and project targets, or an easy way to create and manage bookmarks, or the corkboard index card arranging and coloring. What could be better? Make it easier to choose your own format to start, instead of drafting a screenplay. Give me early, easy directions on how to format pages for 1-inch all around margins, so I can keep track of my MS page count. There’s the Courier debate. Let me use my tabs to indent as a default, rather than making me go to Preferences to tinker with Editing Project Item Preferences.
Moving work out
It’s great to have an RTF export file to print out for yourself. But chapters don’t appear among the Export Project Items… dialog box. You can get a Section, but Storyist doesn’t export a section’s contents, just the section’s synopsis sheet, bereft of details. I had to choose my whole manuscript to export and then trim away what I didn’t want. Makes it one extra step to get pages ready for a review group.
The dialog on where you’re exporting is kind of Unix-y, too: Displayed as a Unix directory “seybold/documents/etc” after you choose it, rather than the standard file folder interface on Just About Every Other Program. I found that the exported manuscript had my beloved tab indents where those first-line indents used to be.
Am I being fussy about these opening cuts from my barber, this story stylist? I’m sure. The range of tools in Storyist is vast, from character sandboxes to writing goal countdowns, structure storyboarding and built-in research bullpens. But somehow, using Scrivener didn’t drive me to the help menu over and over. It simply took on my words, kept the formatting basic, and gave me a way to compare the way a variety of versions would look in my storytelling (scrivenings, it calls them.)
I’m not crazy about a second reference to another review, but Sande hit it dead-on with this startup summary.
If there’s one negative point to make about Storyist, it’s that it can be confusing to beginning users. Sure, the novel manuscript includes a Getting Started description, and there’s an extremely complete User’s Guide available for download (if you’re thinking about using Storyist, read this first!), but I think it would be useful for Storyist to include a short video summary of the tools for those who don’t want to “Read The Frickin’ Manual.”
(To be fair, there are screencasts available such as one that shows how to Customize Project Templates. But finding them is a matter of getting a message from Shepard, who’s extraordinary in his interaction with customers. I ran into a show-stopper bug using 10.6.2 Snow Leopard and a fix came out within two weeks.)
Other reviews say that Scrivener has a steep start-up curve. I’ve worked both programs from scratch and found one a lot steeper than the other. I’m glad to have my picayune fundamentals explained by the Storyist community. But the Facebook feeds for both of these programs say a lot about the vendor’s communication priorities. Scrivener posts a tip of the day on how to use the product. Storyist posts invitations to create, sparking ideas. Many other places to get those invitations, frankly. Program instruction only comes from one source — unless your beta testers step in.
Documentation is really hard, a dying art. Testing it is even harder. Consider my whining to be a bit of unsolicited testing on the 2.1 docs. I want to see Storyist get friendlier on startup to writers launching something other than a screenplay. I believe in such a future — I bought my 1.0 version of Storyist. It just needs more comprehensive 2.0 documentation. On the upside, you get to meet a community of writers in the Forum while you’re learning how to use a good product.
You can download a free trial time-limited versions of Storyist to try it out. Be certain to go to the Storyist support Web site (available as a selection right off the program’s Help menu) to get the User Guide and Forum links you will need.
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