Scrivener-like outliner for Windows?

Posted by Edwin Yip
Sep 29, 2009 at 03:58 AM

Hi Sebastien,

Wow, ‘find related notes on the fly’ is very a very good idea, I have seen such a feature used in some online ticket system to avoid duplicated questions/request, I did not realize this can be such a help in writing, I’m glad and feel lucky that I jumped in this thread :)

Well, I would say the Writing Outliner will be pretty much that kind of tool you described in that thread, imagine this:
1. A treeview like the one in treepad being added to the left side of Word, upon clicking any of the node (document) the document will be shown in Word’s editor.

2. Each of the nodes (documents) can be viewed as index cards like the ones in SuperNoteCard.

3. When you type a new document (a draft or a note), Writing Outliner extracts all keywords from it and use the keywords to match other notes (BTW, should the drafts included in the search?) in the same writing project and list the matching notes on another pane inside Word. Interesting!

Thank you for the good idea Sebastien!

Sebastien Berthet wrote:
>Hello Edwin,
> >Thank you very much for your words about CbC.
> >I did not want to say that
>Scrivener or Writing Outliner can be restrictive in some way. The fact is that there
>are merely two kinds of writers: those who have a plan and those who don’t. That said,
>this is not that binary, because there are part of a story that can still be fuzzy when I
>jump into the first draft. I mean there is a grey area between the “got plan” and “no
>plan” way…
> >On the other hand, what’s sure about writing tools is that they still
>don’t cover all the writing process. Here is a topic where I posted my “most wanted
>feature” in that eternal quest of the perfect
>outliner:
>http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/148
>Maybe Writing
>Outliner can do that?
> >Again, I will be happy to test your software. I will tell you if I
>can use it efficiently in my writing process. Please contact me directly when you can
>make it available.
>Kind regards,
> >Sebastien
>