Writing Aids for writers are numerous. Here are some suggestions and a few visuals. A frequent contributor to The Moral Premise knowledge base, Miquel Banks, recently recommended Literature and Latte's SCAPPLE as a useful writer's aid for outlining, brainstorming, plotting, and visualizing how the many ideas that undergird a novel or screenplay can be organized. Miquel knows I already use Literature and Latte's SCRIVENER for early drafts, such as my novel Sabriya's Hope, which is nearing completion, and is being serialized weekly online.
Scapple is a powerful tool, and it integrates well with Scrivener, as you might expect coming from the same company. I have written about my use of Scrivener in other posts on this blog, and while I don't like everything about it (it has some odd British intuitions), it does have many tools that are invaluable and, I doubt, are available elsewhere.
While Scapple is powerful and easy to use, I chose to stick with Apple's Keynote because of my deep familiarity with it when creating slide presentations for my live workshops, which use hundreds of graphics to illustrate narrative theory and story structure. For some tasks, like right-side brainstorming, Scapple is excellent. But I'm mostly a left-sided thinker and so linear processes and procedures are easier for me...thus Keynote is an easy fit.
I think Scapple can do everything I do in Keynote, as illustrated in the slides at right (clickable to enlarge), but again, it's simply my long use and deep familiarity with Keynote that allows me to keep my focus on completing a novel or screenplay, instead of spending time learning a new system. Elements in the slides on the right were created with a combination of tools from Keynote, Photoshop, Google Maps, and AI from Microsoft Copilot, and ChatGPT/Open AI. (I have modest subscriptions to Microsoft Office and ChatGPT/Open AI.)
