Monday, July 09, 2007

Plotfreaks Ten

Ten Things for the Plot Lovers

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

1. Not sure how to outline your plot? Get some advice from plot kahuna Lee Masterson.

2. Footsteps to a Novel by Margaret Fisk includes a link to her excellent Excel worksheet on plotting scenes by POV ala Holly Lisle.

3. Floating Notes allows you to use virtual stickies on your desktop (beats misplacing all those handwritten Post-Its.)

4. Squirrel Technologies offers a couple of freewares that may appeal to the freestyle plotfreaks out there, such as Notebox Disorganizer.

5. Can a pantser become a plotter? Camy takes a shot in Pantsing and Plotting.

6. How does how you are affect how you plot? Find out from Marg McAlister's article, Plotting by Personality.

7. Escape the Sargasso Sea of plotting with advice on how to deal with Sagging Middles by Dr. Vicki Hinze.

8. Get insight into the whys of plotting from Crawford Killian's Ten Points on Plotting.

9. PBW's Ten Things to Help with Novel Plotting (note that my single novel plotting template is now here; my trilogy plotting template is here, and my mid-length series plotting template is here.)

10. Our blog pal Simon Haynes has made his terrific-for-plotters program yWriter 3 available as a beta release.

Two other freewares of interest to all, no matter how you plot: OpenOffice has gone portable, which means you can take a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database with you on your iPod, portable hard drive, USB thumbdrive or any other portable media. Jarte is a streamlined, simplified word processor with essential, user-friendly features.

Upcoming this week on PBW:

The second annual Left Behind & Loving It virtual workshops -- stay tuned to PBW today for more details.

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for the link to yw3 ;-) I also recommend Freemind, which has a nice organic feel to it. You can start really small and just keep popping ideas in until you end up with something like this.

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  2. Anonymous9:15 AM

    Thanks, PBW! This is just what I needed right now. I'm a "lurker" at the site who rarely leaves comments, but I just wanted to drop you a note to let you know how much I (and apparently so many others) appreciate your regular advice/instruction/inspiration. Hope you have a great week!

    KTB

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  3. Thanks for the links, Lynn. I'm trying to re-plot a novel that went in the wrong direction very quicky right now.

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  4. Ooh, I look forward to the Left Behind workshops! ^_^

    #8 link is now in my favorites. Crawford Killian has a great guide on world building that I refer to time and again.

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