 Great Product |
| Review Date: March 7, 2005 |
| Reviewer: RL, San Fran, Cal |
I ordered this a few days ago, the package arrived yesterday and I'm absolutely thrilled with this program. I consider myself to be an experienced writer, but it has taught me many new things and I'm very pleased with it.
It takes you right from the beginning of writing any kind of story, and takes you through each step. It doesn't give you all the answers, and the finished result won't be a clichéd or formulaic story. Don't think that this program will just hand you the skeleton for your story. Rather, it shows you examples of other skeletons and informs you about what pieces you might think about including. At no point does the program restrict your creativity.
The software is divided into sections, where you can design the book's different worlds and locations (including sections with everything from economical history to creatures to the smells of the place), your own characters (with lots of helpful hints to get you started and many different screens to develop your characters in), the storyline and much more.
I'm very glad I bought this product and I think that any future author needs this useful piece of software. It's turned about two hundred documents of scrappy, disorganised notes into one neat file and my writing is storming ahead. I fully recommend this product. |
Just The Tonic I needed to Boost my Creativity
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| Review Date: July 26, 2006 |
| Reviewer: M.Seth, |
I had been toying with the idea of writing my own Novel for pretty much most of my adult years, but never knew that apart from sitting in a darkened room for a year or so and wracking my brains for ideas and poetic prose all by myself, that indeed there could be such a thing as software to help me actually compose, develop and complete my novel to publishing standard.
Enter - New Novelist - what a brilliant - well thought out and completely revolutionary invention!!!
When I found out that help is out there, I assessed 3 or 4 different types of software that claim to help you write a book or novel. Hands down - I found New Novelist be the Best of The Lot!
The software asked me to firstly outline my characters, their backgrounds etc, then moved onto the setting of my novel, locations and situations, it added critical elements to any thriller such as suspense, suggestions for endings, suggestions for beginnings and truly guided me all the way through my novel. Unbelievably I am half way through a 400 page novel beginning from scratch just three weeks ago. I'm so excited that I've already started contacting publishers to take on my Novel which I am confident of completing within the next two weeks - Thank you New Novelist!!!
If anyone out there has ever used Macromedia Director to create digital movies - you will know the degree of depth that this software goes into to create the perfect masterpiece - Just Imagine New Novelist to be the same thing but applied to writing books - What a breath of Fresh Air!
Good Luck
M.Seth
UK
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Great Product for Certain Writers
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| Review Date: May 17, 2009 |
| Reviewer: G. Eng, Pittsburgh |
This review is for NewNovelist 2.0 running on XP.
Summary: NewNovelist 2.0 is a type of writing software known as "story development software" that aids in the proper structuring of a novel, short-story, or even a screenplay. Other examples of story development software include Dramatica, StoryWeaver, John Truby's Blockbuster, Power Structure, Blake Snyder's Save The Cat software, StoryBase, TotallyWrite, and WritePro.
In addition to NewNovelist2.0, I own Dramatica, StoryWeaver, Save The Cat, StoryBase, TotallyWrite, and WritePro. I've evaluated the others in great detail.
My Reviewer Qualifications: I've written a few yet unpublished short stories and screenplays. To my surprise, the screenplays were highly praised by Hollywood analysts for the writing and the strong structure. I successfully completed several college writing classes, LongRidge Writers Group (short stories and articles), Writer's Digest School (short stories), and Writers Bootcamp (intense 18 month online screenwriting course).
Now on with the review already:
General Comments: NewNovelist 2.0 is really geared more for intermediate to advanced writers. That's not to say that beginning writers won't get anything out of the software. However, to really appreciate the powerful story development concepts underlying this software, you must first become a student of story development and structure.
Hint: Google the story development software titles that I listed above. Read the websites' materials. That will help you to understand deep story development concepts. Two of the best sites are John Truby's Blockbuster and Blake Snyder's Save The Cat. Their software is slanted at screenwriters but the concepts really apply to good storytelling in general.
Ease of Use: NewNovelist 2.0 is simple to use. Pick your story category. It's based on selecting a specific story category and from one of several story types. After that, the software auto-generates a template with the key steps to your story. Each step includes relevant educational text and an expandable area to write as little of much as you want for that story step. Writing is exactly like using MS Word.
Features: There are several nice "resource" features for developing detailed characters, places, objects, and research. Also, I'm very impressed by the audio readback feature. That's right! NewNovelist 2.0 can actually read back what you wrote. It's extremely helpful to hear the words out loud (and not my own) because you get an instant sense of how it sounds to the reader. Very nice!
Help: I can't really comment on help too much. Fortunately, I haven't had to rely on the software or company help. I think the educational text within each story step is a good start. But as I noted earlier, this software was built on some very powerful story development concepts. NewNovelist 2.0 doesn't teach those concepts but it's best to learn them first to get the most out of this software.
Flexibility:
1) Let's say the software generates a ten-step story, but you know your story should have twelve steps. You can change that.
2) Let's say the software generates a ten-step story, but you know that step 7 should occur earlier. You can change that.
3) Let's say you want to use your own story structure. You can do that.
4) Let's say you don't believe in story structure and just want to write what comes to mind. You can do that too.
Issues: I've used the software extensively for about a month. There's one very minor bug in which a character's type (e.g. hero, antagonist, etc.) is displayed via an icon and a radio button after saving. After I saved, the icon represents the correct character type that I selected but the radio button doesn't. As far as I'm concerned, this is a cosmetic bug.
Overall: This is a very nice story development software. For all that you get, the price is great! Intermediate to advanced story writers will really appreciate the many nice features and flexibility of this story writing tool. And beginning writers will get the most if they do some research and self-education before buying. |
New Novelist
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| Review Date: January 28, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Charles A. Reap Jr., Pittsboro, NC USA |
| Now this is a great software program! Although I have already written and published two novels, ("Devil's Game" and "My Friend Sam") with three more in the works, this program adds a great deal of "splendor" to your efforts. It strongly "urges" the aspiring novelist to think out his/her characters in advance. This offers more opportunities for them to go off in interesting tangents. I recommend it very highly! |
Just what I have been looking for!
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| Review Date: October 9, 2007 |
| Reviewer: J. Anderson, London |
I have been thinking about writing a novel for some time now. The only problem is that whenever I sit down to write I always seem to end at the same place. NewNovelist helps me to plan and structure my work and save it accordingly so I can pick up where I left off every time!
Thanks for a great productNewNovelist 2.0 - Novel Writing Software |
Pleasantly surprised
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| Review Date: October 30, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Phil Andrew, USA |
I hesitated before buying this, because you never know with software if you are buying something that will help you, or something that will just waste time and money. The reviews seemed mixed, but the assurance to me was that other people had had good customer support.
I have to say that overall I am very happy with Newnovelist. I played with it with a new story idea I had, and it really helped me pull the story through. Some of the function is pretty basic in comparison with Microsoft products, but I guess I didn't pay Microsoft prices for this! It might not work for everyone, but it gives me another tool in my writing, and I definitely think I got value for money.
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Great Product, Great Service
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| Review Date: December 6, 2007 |
| Reviewer: S. Sivapathasundram, US |
I had been toying with the idea of a book for some time now. About 6 months ago, I came across newnovelist and this was the first step. I purchased a copy and it arrived 2 days later.
I had a few problems with the Vista install so I contacted the support team. They came back to me right away with a patch and in no time at all I was getting stuck in.
The program is very simple, but also has some really neat features that were really useful to me in gathering my thoughts and getting the basic storyline right. The beauty of this is that I could go exactly where my imagination wanted to go and it captured all the creative input and helped me turn this into a story.
Another great feature is that I could have a break, or even come back days later, and everything was saved as I had left it. This meant that there were no interruptions in terms of trying to gather my train of thought.
For anyone who has thought of writing a novel, I would like to highly recommend this piece of software. Not only did it help me finish my first novel, but the guys behind it are really helpful.
Thanks again for a great product!
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Great Service, Great Product! - Thank you!
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| Review Date: October 25, 2007 |
| Reviewer: S. Olivares, USA |
NewNovelist offers a clean, free-form environment that can be adapted to your style of story structuring. It's a well-designed program with a clean interface. You're not forced to follow a set pattern as you write, though you can if you prefer. If not, you have the option to add and rename steps and questions in order to customize the aspects of the story you want to develop.
I think this could be what I've been needing all along. Finally it looks like I've found the right tools to help me take it to the next stage. Very impressed so far! Thanks for the great service and software! |
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