How To… write a novel on your Mac

• Article 70 of 89
• MacFormat, April 2009

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But there are more sophisticated, tailor-made methods as well. If you really are dedicated to your art, then ultimately there are two programs that might well be the Holy Grail for Mac-based writers: Literature and Latte's Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html) and Mariner Software's StoryMill (http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=127) - the daddies of writing tools.

They both offer the full-screen function of Pages and WriteRoom but Scrivener has a 'cork board' for tracking and rearranging notes, an outliner for organising and understanding documents, backup functions for keeping old versions of documents and the ability to embed a whole host of file types, including PDFs and web pages, for research.

StoryMill lets you set up then track, tag and filter characters, scenes, locations, and even research you might have done for the novel. It has a timeline, supports annotations, has a progress meter so you can see if you've been slacking off or working hard enough, and has a built in back-up function, too. As if that weren't enough, it has a word frequency tracker and cliché finder to improve your writing. And when - Oh frabjous day! Calloo! Callay! - your novel is finished, there's the icing on the cake: a tracker to monitor your submissions to editors and agents.

Ultimately, you will be the source of your novel, not your Mac. But your Mac can help you keep track of your files, save you from disaster, make sure you stay focused and even improve your writing. Let it help you so that the only limit is your imagination.

Writing a screenplay
Getting your work on television or the cinema
Maybe you don't want to be the next Shakespeare, but want to be the next William Goldman instead. In which case, there are many screenwriting tools available for your Mac. The undisputed king of screenplay writing is Final Draft (http://www.finaldraft.com/), which is pretty much the gold standard tool for television, screen and theatre writing that everyone in the trade uses. It has a vast range of features that make it stand out from a regular word processor: its support for the script formatting standards used in each industry; index cards for notes for each scene; a panel view for seeing how the script's scenes are structured; templates based on existing scripts; and versioned formatting, so you can not only keep multiple versions of a script, you can see the differences between the versions colour-coded onscreen.

But there are other tools available, most of them cheaper than Final Draft. NovaMind has a mind-mapping based program called ScriptMapping (http://www.novamind.com/screenwriting/) while Mariner Software has two products for aspiring screenwriters: Contour (http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=138), for creating story structures and Montage (http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=104), for writing and formatting scripts. Contour has the usual tools for creating story structures, such as a timeline and character notes, but it also has a system developed by Emmy-nominated writer Jeffrey Alan Schechter that is supposedly capable of guiding you through the plot points of all three acts and explains 'major storytelling secrets to crafting a highly marketable movie'. Once you're done, Montage, which has many of Final Draft's features, lets you write the script. It boasts a simpler user interface than Final Draft's as well as tools to create scenes, add characters to those scenes, and take notes, all without actually writing the script.

Journals and blog
Your daily activities for others to read
If you fancy being the next Samuel Pepys, writing a journal for yourself or a blog for others is the way forward. There are many pieces of software available for the Mac that support the sections, dates and other features needed of journals, including Mémoires (http://www.codingrobots.com/memoires/), viJournal (http://www.skoobysoft.com/vijournal/vijournal.html) and My Journal (http://customsolutionsofmaryland.50megs.com/myjournal.htm/) although MacJournal (http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=85) remains the most fully featured. This has rich text page layout features, as well as advanced security measures for encrypting your journal, in case you actually don't want anyone else to read it.

MacJournal has formidable blogging and podcasting functions and Apple's iWeb (http://www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/) is ubiquitous, but the king of desktop blogging software is ecto (http://illuminex.com/ecto). This supports just about every blogging system out there, including features such as tags and extended entries, stores all your blog entries and photos on your hard drive for offline work, let's you resize pictures and creates thumbnails before you upload your entry and includes plug-ins for working with Amazon stores and Flickr photos.

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