I realize that story plotting software technically isn't Outliner or PIM related; however, I found reviews for earlier versions of Storybook on the site, and I know several people do a lot of creative writing here. So here is a review of the latest release...

I went novelist.ch to purchase a license for the older, 2.x version, of Storybook when I found that 3.0 had just been released. Storybook is a program designed to assist with creating a story, that is plotting, character development, story threads, etc. It comes in both a free version that features 3 views, and a paid version ($26) that adds several different chart and graph tools. The essence of it is that non-linear scenes can be created, and then dragged to different story chapters which appear as notecard. The scenes include characters and locations, as well as the main text. As the story is created through these scenes, a lot of cross-referenced information is automatically generated and viewable. A tree panel on the right hand side gives quick access to different views (character, location, tags, items, chapters, strands, parts), and icons for each of these allows for quick navigation. The final product can be exported in a variety of formats, which then ideally would be written more completely (if not done already). If there are many chapters, it is recommended to break them up into parts, which I usually do as 3 acts (for novels or film ideas).

The three main views are:
1) Chronological view: See how scenes occur over time for each strand (that is, plotline)
2) Manage chapters and scenes: create scenes, drag them to chapters, reorder
3) Book view: See how the final product flows in real time

Let's get quickly to the point: this program if fantastic! I think very non-linearly in my own writing, and this provides a perfect platform for creative content. The interface is very intuitive, and allows you to enter important details without bogging you down in minutia of requiring too much input. The advanced tools (I will get to these shortly) are wonderful at getting an overview of your story and where any imbalances exist. There are also "Ideas" and "Flash of inspiration" to jot down a quick idea, and "Task list" to keep track of what chapters to work on. I think of my stories in a large arc over time with frequent flashbacks, similar to the TV show "Lost", and this program is ideally suited for this.

The advanced tools are:
Memoria - a mind map of items by date, character or location
Who is where, when? - graphical overview of characters appearances over time
Appearance of characters by scene (and date) - charts of this information
Usage of strand by date - histogram
Gantt chart of characters - each character's (that you include) lifetime, overlapped
Occurance of chacters (and locations) - histograms

Several of these are very useful, such as Who is where, when? to ensure that characters are revisited with the intended regularity. The other tools also allow for "load balancing" and make the licensed version worthwhile. When you skip around a lot in time, you inevitably get big chronological gaps where you neglected certain characters. Furthermore, characters ages are tracked throughout and can be seen when hovering over their aliases.

What are the drawbacks? Well, to be quite frank, there are not that many. First, the Chronological view is vertical only, and I would prefer it to be horizontal. I mailed support about this, and the next day a poll was on the site asking if horizontal orientation would be preferred! The developer then mailed me stating that they will investigate the possibility to add this option. Also, exporting doesn't really give a whole book, but gives the complete framework to expand on. This is a limitation of the program as a tool primarily for plotting and story creation as opposed to a full blown word processor.

My plan is to use this in combination with a writing program (ie. Liquid Story Binder), or just as text or MS Word files for each chapter inside Ultra Recall, using the tree structure of UR and exporting later.

I find Storybook 3.0 to be a terrific value, and an invaluable tool. With great development and support, I highly recommend at least downloading the free version to test it. Speaking of "Lost", that show started with promise and continually degraded with nonsensical writing until the last season, which was patently absurd and revealed that the writers had no planned idea whatsoever about the story resolution. The character development was engaging, but the plotlines seem to have been taken out of a hat. I can only imagine how well crafted the story could have been if they had used a tool like Storybook before writing a single episode.

Best, /Pavi

Interesting. Thanks for this, Pavi.

I decided to check this out, but after purchasing/installing, I kept getting the "Java Virtual Machine Launcher - Could Not Find The Main Class - The Program Will Stop" error. After trying a several solutions I found online and reinstalling the latest Java package - I still got the error.

In the folder where the program is installed, there is a .bat file (good ol' DOS batch file) that opens a DOS window and then starts the program without any error. Whether or not this is the proper way to run the program, I don't know, but it appears to work fine now.

I miss DOS...

FWIW

Hi Frederick,

I had no problems installing on my Windows 7 machine. The installer exited normally and put a shortcut on my desktop and in the Start menu. The shortcut is also in the main folder, called "Storybook" as well and launches storybook.jar. If you copy/paste that to your desktop, it is the same as the installed shortcut.

Does that work?

Best, /Pavi

Frederick Wahl wrote:

I decided to check this out, but after purchasing/installing, I kept getting the
"Java Virtual Machine Launcher - Could Not Find The Main Class - The Program Will Stop"
error. After trying a several solutions I found online and reinstalling the latest
Java package - I still got the error.

Pavi wrote:

Hi Frederick,

I had no problems installing on my Windows 7 machine. The installer
exited normally and put a shortcut on my desktop and in the Start menu. The shortcut is
also in the main folder, called "Storybook" as well and launches storybook.jar. If
you copy/paste that to your desktop, it is the same as the installed shortcut.

Does
that work?

Best, /Pavi

I'm running Windows 7 64-bit. When I installed Storybook, it put the sorybook.jar shortcut on my desktop. The problem was trying to run that. I searched for the error on google and tried some of the solutions, but nothing worked - including reinstalling the latest version of Java (64 bit).

Using the .bat file has worked for me though - I don't think I'm missing anything running it that way. Just wanted to post my solution in case someone else ran into the same trouble.

Best Regards,
Frederick

I'm also running Windows 64-bit and had no trouble installing.

The problem might have been with Java alright, but not Java 64-bit. I assume that Storybook is a 32-bit program so it would require 32-bit Java (an older version of which is probably lying around in your PC already, that's why Storybook has no trouble running via the bat file). If you update your 32-bit Java installation, chances are the shortcut will work too, as the installation will set the proper environment variables.

64-bit Java is required by programs such as 64-bit Internet Explorer. In a 64-bit PC, both 32-bit and 64-bit Java environments should be installed, as the majority of programs will be 32-bit anyway.

To avoid sounding smart undeservedly, I should add that I read of the above only recently, after the Sun Java website refused to install 64-bit Java for me (which I believed was my PC's unalienable right to have!) unless I did it through the 64-bit IE.

Hi, since there was some trouble installing it, I would like to point the developer Martin here, if that's okay. Others probably have the same problem and it would be a shame if that interfered with people trying it out.

How do you like the software?

I also realized that it can be used to keep complete chronological histories for characters, even for parts on in the book/film/etc. For example, in my story, a main character has not seen his father in 15 years, and we see how they drifted in flashbacks and see the father in the present time. However, we don't see what happened to the father in those 15 years, which I like to plot out anyway to have complete motivations and character development. It also helps me plan things, ie. "You didn't come to my retirement 7 years ago." I am doing this now by having one part at the end, called "Unused". Thus, all scenes that aren't in the book go here, and they are very basic one sentence description of key events. I asked Martin if he can include a checkbox "Do not include" for this purpose.

It really adds to the potential of this program as a story creation and plotting tool as opposed to a writing environment.

Best, /Pavi

Sorry, I meant for parts NOT in the book/film, etc.

Best, /Pavi

Pavi wrote:

I meant for parts NOT in the book/film, etc.

Like everyone, I have a novel inside me, but I purchased Storybook with something much more radical in mind. I believe that such a tool can be valuable in project management, with its ability to provide different viewpoints to the story (projects?), including scenes (tasks?) and characters (human resources?) etc.

In fact, I have always resented the mechanistic approach of classic project management tools, more suitable for construction work (no offence) than modern service-oriented projects. At the same time, social network oriented solutions seem quite unsophisticated and can easily lead to chaos with complex projects.

I know that StoryView (now renamed Outline4D) has been used in this way. I wonder whether there are exmples of Storybook in some kind of project management setting.

Hi, although I have no connection with the program, in talks with the developer I got the impression that Storybook was designed to be for story creation only.

However, after some thought, I now believe that you may be on to something:

"Parts" could be major sections of a project, ie. phases
"Strands" could be projects
"Chapters" could be subsections of a project
"Scenes" could be individual tasks
"Characters" would be assigned persons
"Locations" might be actually locations, or required infrastructure
"Tags" and "Items" could be used flexibly for requirements

The ability to navigate all of these individually as well as have visual overviews by phases (Parts) or by project (Strands) is very powerful, as is the internal cross referencing. The ability to right click on an item and change the view moving directly to that item in a new view is extremely useful as well.

The author would need to change the charting a bit, ie. the Gantt charts are currently hard coded for a character's lifetime, but the author did mention possibly changing this. Adding a few options would open up the possibilities considerably.

I also am considering using this for personal goal planning, which would take advantage of the use of dates as well as the other features. Another option would be as a nicely indexed journal. In conclusion, the program is so useful, that there seem to be many unintended applications for it which I hope the author takes into consideration!

Best, /Pavi

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Pavi wrote:
>I meant for parts NOT in the book/film, etc.

Like everyone, I have a
novel inside me, but I purchased Storybook with something much more radical in mind. I
believe that such a tool can be valuable in project management, with its ability to
provide different viewpoints to the story (projects?), including scenes (tasks?)
and characters (human resources?) etc.

In fact, I have always resented the
mechanistic approach of classic project management tools, more suitable for
construction work (no offence) than modern service-oriented projects. At the same
time, social network oriented solutions seem quite unsophisticated and can easily
lead to chaos with complex projects.

I know that StoryView (now renamed Outline4D)
has been used in this way. I wonder whether there are exmples of Storybook in some kind
of project management setting.

To use Storybook as a project management tool sounds like a very interesting idea. I was actually wondering if this software could also be used for organising qualitative research material for the social sciences. E.g. perhaps characters don't need to be just human characters in a story (such as a case study) but a character also could be an organisation or a technological artefact or anything else that is being studied.

Pavi, thanks!

I actually posted my suggestion via the developer's website and got a positive reply; I'm glad that it wasn't just PR :-)

Let me say that I'd be very happy to suggest specific ideas and to play around with betas and the like. 'Classic' project management software rarely differentiate between stuff and people, calling them all 'resources'. Storybook provides a planning environment where it is OK for people to interact as people, and that is actually part of the plan. Moreover, playing around with the graphs and reports, I found that they can be used to describe collaborators' roles in a quite humane and integrated way, i.e. "this is what you have to do, these are the people you'll be working with, this is where you'll be located and here's how all this fits into the bigger picture".

I could go on further into visualisation and how having a plausible plan in one's mind can help them get somewhere worthwhile, and how stories are powerful visualisation techniques; my point however was not to become too philosophical, but to highlight the practical advantages.

Re my current experimentation, my setup differs slightly from yours: for me each "book" would be a single project and "strands" would be "work packages" which include several tasks ("scenes") running concurrently. The advantage of using strands this way is that you can view their progress in parallel in the chronological view. Nevertheless, within the context of a multi-project team I can understand the approach of combining projects as strands into a book.

Let me say that I find this discussion useful within the context of this forum, as I'm quite certain I'm not the only one who's tried various (project/life) planning tools and has been disappointed. I found your idea for personal goal setting particularly thought-provoking. I wonder whether others here might be interested in contributing.

Notwithstanding, I'd be more than happy to continue this discussion to Storybook's own forum, but unless I've missed something there is only a Facebook group mostly used for announcements.

Dr Andus wrote:

E.g. perhaps characters
don't need to be just human characters in a story (such as a case study) but a character
also could be an organisation or a technological artefact or anything else that is
being studied.

Indeed, in my experimentation I used characters for our partner organisations in a project; each organisation has a manager and a deputy in the project and it really makes little sense to differentiate among them as they manage their subdivision of labour internally.

Interestingly, Storybook provides the possibility to create new "genders" for characters. I created the gender "organisation" and my collaborators are now depicted as friendly aliens...

Dr. Andus and Alexander,

Very nice that you find Storybook to be productive. And many thanks for suggesting the other uses!

The more I use it, the more I realize the power in its simplicity and cross-referencing. For example, tags can be used in a story to track a subplot that doesn't warrant its own strand. But since they can attach to a character, location, or scene (individually or a stretch), they can be used for nearly anything. In project management or personal goals, this can fill in a lot of functionality. The memoria tool (tree view especially) also becomes much more useful as it visually represents relationships within data items by date. Personally, I think there should be an option for memoria without date to show relationships for tags, for example, over the course of a project.

It seems like we can use it in this manner as it is, and hopefully discover what changes to recommend to the developer to make it a more useful project management tool. If this could appeal to a broader audience, it would certainly also drive faster development.

There is a forum at the sourceforge page which includes bug reports and recommendations. I also would like to continue the discussion here to share our implementations, while reporting there could get the message out to other users.

Best, /Pavi

Hi, just wanted to mention that Marin has released version 3.1. It adds a number of features, including:

- horizontal orientation for Chronological view (I asked for this)
- button to remove a character's life cycle (I asked for this), which could enhance the Gantt chart for project management
- easier to switch views, resize inside views
- "Reading view" to give a book style with table of contents
- Manual, including PDF
- hot keys
- more, listed here: http://www.novelist.ch/joomla/index.php/en/release-notes

The two I asked for, as well as the reading view, enhance the software significantly. The only things I really want now are minor: 1) The ability to make a scene without a date, and 2) Option to hide a scene from the book (for backstory purposes).

Best, /Pavi

I just took a look at Storybook. I found the discussions of other uses rather interesting. Along with the project management application, I could imagine lawyers using it to plot out the activities that took place during the commission of a crime (real stuff rather than plotting fiction).

The thought I had is that if you wish to use the concepts (e.g. chapter, character, thread) in another context (project, workpackage, etc.) - the language selection feature of Storybook would allow you to do that with no changes by the developer. I looked at the language resources and would bet that making the right changes to a couple of files would create the application you are looking for.

Just a thought....

Charles

CRC wrote:

I looked at the language
resources and would bet that making the right changes to a couple of files would create
the application you are looking for.

Just a thought....

...and a rather brilliant one, I believe.

CRC wrote:

The thought I had is that if you
wish to use the concepts (e.g. chapter, character, thread) in another context
(project, workpackage, etc.) - the language selection feature of Storybook would
allow you to do that with no changes by the developer. I looked at the language
resources and would bet that making the right changes to a couple of files would create
the application you are looking for.

Charles, would you mind being a bit more specific as to how to do this (for the benefit of the technically-challenged among us, i.e. me)? Thanks.

If I may respond instead of Charles (and check my understanding by the way), it appears that Storybook has a very open approach to multilingual support. The terms to be used in menus etc for each language are kept in a separate text file somewhere under the Storybook Pro directory. The structure of the terms itself seems quite clear, e.g. msg.category.central.characters=Hauptfiguren in the German file.

What this means is that one can choose the text file for a language that they wouldn't normally use, and edit it with their own terms for project management, legal case documentation or whatever. Then, when selecting that language from Preference, the chosen terms would be shown instead of "characters" etc.

That's the theory as I understand it. Let's see how it works in practice.

Alexander:

You've got it exactly. It appears that the developer used a tool called "Popeye" (http://sourceforge.net/projects/popeye/ for the editing, but the file is really a text file so it should be easy to edit. I have Storybook installed on a different computer, but as I remember it the files are in a "res" or "resources" directory under the installation directory. There seemed to be two files for each language.

For the adventurous who make the changes - let us know how it goes.

Charles

CRC wrote:

Alexander:

You've got it exactly. It appears that the developer used a tool called
"Popeye" (http://sourceforge.net/projects/popeye/ for the editing, but the
file is really a text file so it should be easy to edit. I have Storybook installed on a
different computer, but as I remember it the files are in a "res" or "resources"
directory under the installation directory. There seemed to be two files for each
language.

Alexander, Charles - thank you for that.

Yikes! I can't believe with all this talk about using Storybook as a project management tool that I didn't realize this. It seems like under "File-preferences", then the Translator tab you can enter translator mode. This then adds a menu "Translator tools" and under that "Run Attesoro", which appears to control the text for each language.

I didn't get any changes to save successfully (I am using it only for stories at present), but it surely is possible.

Anyone with luck doing this?

Best, /Pavi

Dr Andus wrote:

CRC wrote:
>Alexander:
>
> You've got it exactly. It appears that the developer
used a tool called
>"Popeye" (http://sourceforge.net/projects/popeye/ for the
editing, but the
>file is really a text file so it should be easy to edit. I have
Storybook installed on a

Storybook will be featured on Bitsdujour this week: http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/storybook-pro/