Any writers on the SDMB that have used this software? If so, what were your thoughts on it regarding its utility as a writing tool?
Haven’t used it but take a look at New Novelist, it’s about a tenth of the price in Amazon. It’s uses the Hero with a Thousand Faces, mythic structure approach and I find it very good. I beleive there is a full feature demo.
I messed around with a trial version in College. Pretty useless unless you want to write formulaic plots. I recall that their “discovery” was that they had this ridiculous arrangement of squares that provided the basis of EVERYTHING. (I.e.
AB
CD
was an example and if your characer was A, then D was his enemy, C was his friend and B was the enemy’s minion, each of which was assigned a trait that, depending on whch level of the square you were at told you everything from their role on the story to their personality traits, everything coming back to the relationship with the hero).
Not a bad tool to make sure that you cut out some of the fluff in your writing, but it does tend to lock you into a particular format (“oh no it doesn’t,” the manual explains, “there are 123,12345,5455636,76.34 combinations that could occur! That’s 10^4000000 more stories than have ever been written”). Of course, one could argue that this is the “Monomyth” that every story takes root from, so you’re going to use it one way or another.
IIRC, they had the manual online as well (this is going back years though, it may have changed), which told you everything that the software did. I’d recommend reading through this as they reproduced the Cosmic Cube (or Square of Attributes, or whatever it was called), which was the basis of their entire system. I tried typing my then-screenplay idea into the thing and several hours later, I figured out that 1) my story structure was all fine and 2) I had to alter everything about the characters to make it fit the square-scheme. Considering that I was 1) a punk-ass screenwriting student and 2) Trying to write a period epic (Jidai-gekithat would showcase the ambiguous nature of humanity I wasn’t happy with the program trying to cut/add characters until there was one trait/purpose per character and a managable number of characters, per your typical Hollywood blockbuster, I gave up on it. So I wasn’t the target audience.
Here’s the summary, if you made it this far: The idea’s farily interesting, but nothing new, just the standard “amazing discovery that makes Aristotle look like a fool” that every new screenwriting book comes up with. It does help to frame your thinking in a certain way, which is useful, but, as I mentioned, you can get the theory off of the then-available .pdfs on theri web site. The rest of the program then becomes a $700 (at the time) series of templates to enter your ideas.
I recommend against the program, but if you’re interested, read their theory book and then decide.