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Excerpted from Portfolio Arts - Winter 2006
Excerpted from: Portfolio Arts – Winter 06 / AllWrite | The pen, reconsidered
By Aine Greaney
If you feel that writing the old-fashioned way requires the patience of a saint, the newest software for authors might rescue you from your own personal hell.
E.L. Doctorow said. "A book begins as a private excitement of the mind." But I'll wager that, a few days into the grand idea, even Doctorow watched his "private excitement" divide into sub-ideas, scenes, characters and motivations - all stopping, starting or switching lanes along the way. Were there mornings when he hadn't a clue what to write next?
To the rescue: today's array of software for writers of everything from sermons to sonnets; from blockbusters to business proposals, from grants to greeting cards. And it's all yours for a fee — many with a tree test drive.
For my window-shopping, I started with the almost familiar-Script Wizard® ($69) and Prose Pro® ($49), add-on programs to my old and trusted Microsoft® Word. Script Wizard is mainly geared toward script and play-writers, while Prose Pro helps the fiction and non-fiction author. Prose Pro also boasts "new support for poetry and lyrics." Script Wizard includes templates for professional script formats, including screenplays, sitcoms, soaps, radio-style scripts, and stage plays. Prose Pro will format publisher-ready documents, creating chapter and section breaks, managing page headers and numbering pages, creating reference lists, and formatting special text.
Elaine Ricci of
Ipswich used Script Wizard for her screen plays, because "the rules for screenplay formatting are very specific. You almost have to use a formatting program to keep from going crazy." Ricci, also a novelist, admits she has never used a software program for plotting: "It always felt too canned for me."... …Maybe one of the daily prompts in the Musings program should be to imagine what Emerson or
Dickinson would write about writing software. But whatever about the ghosts of our scribbling past, where is the link between invention and convention? Creativity and consumables? … Stefani Warren, who developed and markets the Script Wizard and Prose Pro® for Microsoft says, "Good material gets purchased and produced even it is hand-written on paper towels. And bad material doesn't get purchased no matter what program the writer used to type it in."
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