yWriter

I'm digging on this yWriter program!

It's designed to let you zoom-in and zoom-out of a project.

One of the problems with designing a screenplay using 3x5 cards is that you can't tell how much story information is too much or too little. You have to write the actual pages to know how long a scene's actually gonna play.

But, of course, if you jump into the pages too fast it's easy to miss structural steps.

So here's where yWriter comes in handy!!!

You star a project, then add a "Chapter". But you get to name the "Chapter" what you want, so you can call it a scene.

I'm going with a wierd-ish unit of measurement: The first and last act have 10 units (scenes) and the second act has 20. But so I don't get locked into a sequence of scenes right off the bat, I assign a letter to each scene I add. But there are only 26 letter in the alphabet, so I have to double up some of the letters. Now, because I'm a freak I chose to double up on the first and last act, then use a single letter to name the second act. So ACT I is AA-JJ, ACT II is A-T and ACT III is KK-TT.

That's not particularly important. What's importan is that every time I ad a scene, I write a brief description of it, then write a draft of THE PAGES!!! And yWriter is setup for that!

Everytime I come up with a scene, I have a rough idea of how long it's gonna play. If it's a short scene I know that I'll need to add at least one more scene. If it's long I'll know that I may need to drop a scene, or at least shorten a scene!

So I can "zoom in" to the story, then "zoom" back "out" again to keep an eye on the structure!!!

HOW GENIUS IS THAT?!!!

Okay, but that's not all!!!

When you add a new scene, the program is set up with fields to asnwer the following quetions:

- Whose scene is it? Who drives the scene?
- What's that character's goal?
- What is the conflict of the scene?
- What is the outcome of the scene?

Then you can rate the relevance, tension, humor and quality of the scene.

And there's also some stuff about "Day", "Hour" and "Minute" that I haven't figured out yet.

But just having those blank fields on the screen BEGS you to go ahead and make some important desicions about each new scene, stuff you might not really consider if you were just plotting on cards or writing pages. The program FORCES you to consider some key elements of writing!!!

The program is so cool that Tommy -- when I told him about it -- got the idea of taking it s step further and creating a program based on Robert McKee's Structre, so that you would have Value Charge fields -- for Beginning Value Charge and Ending Value Charge -- which would certainly be helpful!

Then that leads me to want to add Karl Iglesias fields for Beginning Character Emotion and Ending Character Emotion and Beginning Audience Emotion and Ending Audience Emotion, to further focus the thrust of wach scene!!!

Maybe that's overkill, but I don't think so.

Anyway, yWriter is CERTAINLY worth checking out, at the VERY LEAST!!!

AND... what's more, IT'S FREE!!! (THANK YOU Simon Haynes!!!)