I'm not sure. I try to keep comprehensive notes about when Aunt Emily met the jailer, and what her favourite kind of beer is etc., but I'd go mad if I didn't hold most of that information in my head. Writing novels would be very tedious if you kept having to refer back to notes. It's probably less significant, but not all that much so.
Memory certainly applies, and in that respect programming is somewhat like writing a novel.
However, unlike writing a novel, I rarely have a need to write the story. Lots of my programming is purely pragmatic - all of my writing is, um, cathartic. :-)
There's an interesting crossover there for me - I've got an idea for a project which is basically a huge "writer's pad", making the act of taking and porganising your notes on characters/places/people REALLY easy.
The problem is figuring out how to store the data - which is much harder than it seems, given the very free-form way I'd like to present and use it. And paper pads are cheap and easy to search - as is a big ol' text file. (The Windows text editor might be called Notepad for a reason, you know!) The personal cost of developing the ultimate writer's notepad just doesn't outweight its benefits for me... *sighs*
Have you tried Newnovelist? I'm not convinced it's worth the full price, but I picked up a [legal] copy for about a fiver on Ebay and I find it quite useful.
The main problem I have it that NewNovelist is *very* focused on getting you to write a specific kind of story. That's very frustrating for me, really - it doesn't seem to fit the way I want to write. I can understand that it's doing it to try to make my story better - but it's also forcing me down a very narrow lane.
I like to write in a fairly free-form way, in which my characters just create the story around a very skeleton plot. So I don't know much about the story as it starts, and won't until it's in progress. NewNovelist makes me feel like I should have all my characters, all my events, all my places and all of my story written already before I use it.
It wasn't a complete waste of money - it reinforced ome good writing patterns, and I learnt the idea of specific story types from it. But how well do you think it copes with Space Opera? Or with a P. G. Wodehouse-ian drama? The damned thing's designed for chick lit and detective novels, and that's about it. :-|
*ahem*
Sorry. Got a bit ranty there. But thanks for the pointer, and maybe I should re-install NewNovelist and give it another try...
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However, unlike writing a novel, I rarely have a need to write the story. Lots of my programming is purely pragmatic - all of my writing is, um, cathartic. :-)
There's an interesting crossover there for me - I've got an idea for a project which is basically a huge "writer's pad", making the act of taking and porganising your notes on characters/places/people REALLY easy.
The problem is figuring out how to store the data - which is much harder than it seems, given the very free-form way I'd like to present and use it. And paper pads are cheap and easy to search - as is a big ol' text file. (The Windows text editor might be called Notepad for a reason, you know!)
The personal cost of developing the ultimate writer's notepad just doesn't outweight its benefits for me... *sighs*
The main problem I have it that NewNovelist is *very* focused on getting you to write a specific kind of story. That's very frustrating for me, really - it doesn't seem to fit the way I want to write. I can understand that it's doing it to try to make my story better - but it's also forcing me down a very narrow lane.
I like to write in a fairly free-form way, in which my characters just create the story around a very skeleton plot. So I don't know much about the story as it starts, and won't until it's in progress. NewNovelist makes me feel like I should have all my characters, all my events, all my places and all of my story written already before I use it.
It wasn't a complete waste of money - it reinforced ome good writing patterns, and I learnt the idea of specific story types from it. But how well do you think it copes with Space Opera? Or with a P. G. Wodehouse-ian drama? The damned thing's designed for chick lit and detective novels, and that's about it. :-|
*ahem*
Sorry. Got a bit ranty there. But thanks for the pointer, and maybe I should re-install NewNovelist and give it another try...