Writer’s Café – Organisation Tool for Authors

Jan 17, 2009

In the past, I’ve always stuck with using various documents to keep myself sorted out when it comes to character names, plot sequences, outline, etc.  Mostly MS Word.  It’s clunky, but it works.

When I started a new project last year, however, I decided to check out the market and see what tools there are for this.  I tend to shop and compare, so I went to amazon UK to see what reviewers said about various writer’s solution.  The choice left me feeling fairly dismal.  I know.  Amazon reviewers are notoriously cranky and often spiteful, but there’s really little that annoys me more than plunking out for a program that, for example, the publishers say is Vista compatible, but when I try to install it, it turns out “compatible” means “will eat all your other software and you will never reboot in peace again”.

In the reviews for one program, Writers Café, I noticed the reviewer said that if you go to the official website, you can download a free trial.  I went, I downloaded, and two days later I bought the full version.  I can’t imagine beginning another writing project without it!

Features:

• Drag and Drop cards for organising your plot.  I used one card for each scene.  Also, the cards can be colour-coded, so, say, the mystery element of the plot is in the “brown” line, while the romance element of the plot is the “blue” line.  This helped me see how my plot was progressing, but also how balanced my chapters were.
• Character Sheets: I used these, but I felt they could be bigger.   This gives you a place to write out details of your character from their age to their appearance to their motivation in the story.  The best part is that you can customise the fields, so, say, if you’re writing a supernatural story, you can have a field for “Superpower” or whatever.
• You can do something similar with locations, although I didn’t use this for this particular book.  I probably should have though.
• It interfaces with OpenOffice.org Writer pretty seamlessly, although you can add links on your “Writer’s Café desktop” to any program.  I found I liked Open Office’s Word Processor.  It works just like MS Word, but it’s FREE.  Yes.  FREE.  Plus it has PDF export support so I can easily put things on my Sony Reader.
• I did NOT compose within Writer’s Café, but I think that feature would work best for writing screenplays.  Instead I used OpenOffice.org Writer, because I had better control over my formatting, which all writers know needs to be precise for manuscripts.
• It has a name generator, which is fun, actually.  It makes some pretty wild suggestions, but you can also just browse through a list.  Saves me having to go to baby name websites to find names!
• Pinboard.  This feature I LOVED.  I was able to import pictures for my characters.  I often like to use photos of real people (I always use strangers and no famous faces) so that when I describe characters, if I need to, I can look at a photo.  This helps me so much.  I also added notes, put characters into groups like “Zoe’s Office” or “Thomas’s clients” and also posted a picture of some of the locations, again to help me get over bumpy description patches.  I cannot tell you how wonderful this feature is.  I would buy this program for this alone!
• Notebook and Journal.  These features are similar.  The only difference is the Journal pages are dated and progress each day you log in, while the Notebook pages are static.  I used the Journal to track my daily word count goals, and the Notebook for research notes.  Perfect!
• I liked that it supports many platforms, and your work is very easy to back up.  I used this when going between my laptop and my PC, because my laptop is Unix based, and Writer’s Café is Unix compatible as well.  There’s also a Mac OS version!

Price:  If you want a disk, it’s $65 / £32.20.  Download only: $45 / £22.  I bought the download version (I always lose disks anyway) and it was perfect.   There is a free trial, but you’re limited to how many cards you can put into your storyboard on the trial version.  But it’s definitely enough to play around and decide if you like it!

Website: Writers Café

Note: I’m not being paid to promote this, nor do I earn any commissions, etc.  I just love this program!