Any writers here, and if so...

[vijil]

What software do you recommend?

I kind of want to be able to do this to get my epic scifi thoughts in order, but I can't find anything that does it this way:

[SignOfZeta]

What you need to make those kinds of charts is a pen and paper. Or some other way of drawing. They are drawings. They remind me of Yoshimura’s Nine Postcards.

[vijil]

True except for the obvious part when I need to rearrange things and don't want to start over.

[SignOfZeta]

You draw it again. Are you allergic to pencils or something? Do those drawings look hard to make?

If you’re afraid of even that level of rework then writing isn’t for you. Shopping for software before writing anything is also a famous sign. You don’t need it. Tolkien didn’t even have White Out and he made the biggest bestest longest most popular books to ever bore a person to death.

[vijil]

Does anyone *else* have some genuine thoughts?

[Axel]

Don't mind Zeta, he's the designated village curmudgeon

[BrickHaus]

Well, I've never tried it, but you could shove it down chat gpt's throat. Seems like a good use foe AI for a change? Worst case scenario, is you have less editing to do on the back side of that. Rather than starting from scratch.



The lord of the rings one is a trip. I enjoyed analyzing that this morning.

That or, Id say just get a large whiteboard .

[vijil]

As in, have it generate the image? Could almost do that, since I've written a lot already.

I don't think it's there yet though - the image generation is very much about the overall vibe or whatever, it doesn't do accurate diagrams or anything yet that I'm aware of.

[BrickHaus]

I'd ask it to generate a timeliness based on the format of the image posted. Then indeed your stories, and let it go? Can't it do that?

[Axel]

Rough as Zeta may be (and we love him for it), I think he's got a point.

One of my professors just made me transcribe an oral history recording by hand, even though there are plenty of good programs that will do it with just a little bit of editing necessary. He compared it to using a robot to lift weights. Quote, "...you don’t build muscle if you don’t practice doing some tedious tasks."

[vijil]

This much is fair. Zeta was basing his point on incorrect assumptions which I would have to address, which gets everything off track and soon you're arguing irrelevancies. There are loads of people with good points, just that most of them don't require filtering out as much bullshit. I'm too old to wade through all that.

I can do some drawings, sure whatever. I could use scrivener or whatever too. Or not - google docs is perfectly good and what I've been using so far. Notion works too. But I also happen to like playing with systems. It helps keep me interested.

[Fubarius]

There are a few programs and websites out there originally designed for RPG campaign notes, but many have features that can help a writer. World Anvil for example, it even claims to double as a novel writing software. And I believe it has a timeline function of some sort. Haven't tinkered with it yet (I'm not much of a note writer, I write more by the seat of my pants), but it has a free trial to monkey around with.

[vijil]

Thanks, I'll look into them

I generally start off as a pantser but eventually get confused and need to write some notes

[SignOfZeta]

Well, I've never tried it, but you could shove it down chat gpt's throat. Seems like a good use foe AI for a change? Worst case scenario, is you have less editing to do on the back side of that. Rather than starting from scratch.



The lord of the rings one is a trip. I enjoyed analyzing that this morning.

That or, Id say just get a large whiteboard .

The problem with AI is that you have to develop your own quality control process in parallel with whatever AI is doing because even the best AI there is makes TONS of mistakes. You’d have to recheck the entire image by hand every time you changed it, even if you just change the font, which is waaaay more work.

A ruler. Large format graph paper. Come on, at least *try* it. I swear we’re somehow at a point where if something doesn’t exist digitally it’s not real. The opposite is true. “Hack writer” and “AI” are now synonymous.