Liquid Story Binder Writer's Word | Writer’s Tools

Liquid Story Binder Writer's Word Processor

Aspiring and accomplished writers alike know that disorganized thoughts can be a maddening hindrance to creativity. Especially when all of those disorganized thoughts are spread across a maelstrom of notebooks, Word files, post-it's, emails, magazine margins, storyboard sketches, and whatever else.

Liquid Story Binder is designed for authors, poets, writers, novelists, anyone writing a book or anything at all really! No matter what your ability level, Liquid Story Binder is the ideal program for writing, and will provide you with all the tools you need to create, outline, organize, timeline, revise, storyboard, conceive, diagram, and format your work.

It even includes a built-in audio recorder in case you want to listen to the pacing and phrasing of a particular section, paragraph, or sentence!

Liquid Story Binder is completely customizable. Choose a color scheme that suits you, save window positions and open files, create workspaces, open dozens of windows simultaneously or just a simple textbox centered in the screen... it's up to you, your comfort zone, and your writing style!

Can't remember where you wrote that important paragraph? A Universal Search feature makes finding it a snap. Search every Chapter, Note, Builder, Timeline, Storyboard, Outline, Dossier, Sequence and Backup for a single lost word or phrase. Plus, the Repetition Visualizer helps you to find and weed out repetitive words and phrases, at-a-glance!

Extremely adaptable, Liquid Story Binder utilizes common TXT, RTF, and ZIP file formats, guaranteeing future access. It can be stored and executed off of a portable USB drive, and automatically creates an easy-to-access backup file with an entry for each day's changes. Liquid Story Binder is the ultimate software for writing.⁸

 

 

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[Liquid Story Binder XE ]

 

 A Portable Text Editor that Keeps You Organized

 

Liquid Story Binder XE is a uniquely designed word processor for professional and aspiring authors, poets, and novelists. Writing software for those who require the editing ability of a commercial text editor as well as a document tracking system. It is for those who want the freedom to create, outline and revise but are tired of losing track of their work.

Dossiers

Create Dossiers for major characters and settings.

Timelines

Plot your novel by organizing cards along colored timelines.

Storyboards

Combine images and text to create a visual reference board.

Journals

Create a writing journal, or even fictional journals for each one of your characters.

Outlines

Create a collapsible tree of plot ideas.

Mindmaps

Link ideas together using lines and text.

Image Galleries

Organize your reference images into galleries.

Checklists

A list of titles and captions with checkmarks.

Contrasts

A two-columned list for direct comparisons.

Builders

Organize complex scenes using titles, descriptions, and color indexing.

Position Memory

Liquid Story Binder XE remembers just where you left off.

Manuscript Building

Combine multiple chapters into a single manuscript automatically.

Printing

Preserve your font and paragraph editing with Format Printing.

Workspaces

Preserve your favorite window layouts for quick access.

Project Goals

Words per day, words left to write, days remaining, multi-document word counts.

Color Schemes

Create the perfect writing environment with your favorite window colors.

Recordings

Record yourself reading your own novel. Test for pacing and time.

File Listings

Organize all your files into easy-access file trees.

Backups

Every Chapter has its own backup repository. Never lose a single word with automatic version and session backups. Compress your whole archive into a single ZIP file.

Shortcuts

Quickly access your favorite external software and documents.

Statistics

Times, Word Counts, Goals, Sessions, Versions, Days.

Reader

Read over your work in a easy to view columned window, free of editing distractions.

Music Playlists

Add your MP3s and sort them into playlists. Set the mood for writing.

External Editing

Open your work outside of Liquid Story Binder.

 

[ Download Demo]


[Liquid Story Binder XE ]

How to Use the Snowflake Method to Outline Your Novel ❄️

 

How to Use the Snowflake Method to Outline Your Novel

• What Is the Snowflake Method?
• What Are the Advantages to Using the Snowflake Method?
• How to Use the Snowflake Method
• The 5 Steps of the Snowflake Method
• Want to Learn More About Writing?
• 
  

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 As a snowflake grows from its center core, it expands in all directions, breaking off into additional branches that give it greater volume and spatial scope. The snowflake method of fiction writing applies this concept to the craft of storytelling.

 

What Is the Snowflake Method?

 

The snowflake method, created by author and writing instructor Randy Ingermanson, is a technique for crafting a novel from scratch by starting with a basic story summary and adding elements from there.

What Are the Advantages to Using the Snowflake Method?

 

The advantage of the snowflake method is that it offers a midpoint between the formality of traditional outlines and the intentionally unplanned approach known as freewriting. This makes the snowflake method an appealing prewriting method for novelists of all levels, from those writing their first novel to seasoned pros with advanced fiction writing skills

 

The primary advantage to using the snowflake method at the start of the writing process is its intrinsic conduciveness to free association and discovery. Traditional one-page plot or multi-page outlines can work beautifully for some fiction writers, as can notecards on a tackboard, but sometimes these processes can be unhelpfully cerebral.

 

How to Use the Snowflake Method

 

To begin using the snowflake method, think of a story idea and describe it with a one-sentence summary. For example, the sentence could be something like: “Two teenagers discover a secret cave that contains treasures that a group of criminals has been hunting for.”

 

The snowflake method then requires you to build that sentence into a paragraph, using that paragraph to create various character descriptions. From there, you use those descriptions to create a series of storylines that involve those characters.

 

This process of outlining a novel spans outward until you have a fully outlined novel, just as a snowflake expands from a single drop of water.

 

The 5 Steps of the Snowflake Method

1.  
2. 1. Choose a premise and write it up in a one-sentence summary. This single sentence will be the foundation for your entire novel’s outline.
3.  
4. 2. Expand that one-sentence summary into a full paragraph. Use that sentence to write a one-paragraph summary to explain the main story of the novel. It should also identify core characters, and break their narrative into a structure with a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you wish to conceive of your story with a three-act structure, think about the primary exposition, the inciting action and development, and the climax. Note that a story can have more than three plot points. No matter how many you choose, each of these plot points will be a spoke stemming off from the central hub that is your premise.
5.  
6. 3. Create character summaries. Rooting yourself in the narrative you’ve just written out in a single paragraph, begin to explore the major characters who will populate your story. What are their core characteristics? What is each character’s point of view? What roles will they serve in relation to the main premise?
7.  
8. 4. Build your character summaries into full profiles. Now it’s time to add a few more extensions to your snowflake by creating full characterizations from those summaries. Consider the characters you’ve just roughly sketched and ask: What is each character’s name? Which of these will be the main character? What are their biographies and backstories? How will each character’s goal, each character’s conflicts, and each character’s epiphanies help them overcome those conflicts? What do they look like? What are their affectations?
9.  
10. 5. Expand to a multi-page synopsis. By this point, the snowflake method has generated a core story, a multi-part plot structure, character names, and multiple character profiles (or character synopses). You are now ready to expand these elements into a brief four-page synopsis. As you encapsulate the whole story in full pages, focus on a list of scenes, who is in them, and what events will occur in them. Are there any major disasters? Remember that every event is building toward the end: the story’s climax. A great story with a weak ending will quickly be forgotten.

 

Once you have these elements drafted, your literary snowflake is complete, and you’re ready to dive into the first draft of your novel and start writing fiction!

Also see:

• The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel by Randy Ingermanson ❄️
• How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method
• Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

Writing Prompt: Irritating Gnat

 

 

 Writing Prompt: Irritating Gnat

 

These exercises were written by IWW members and administrators to provide structured practice opportunities for its members. You are welcome to use them for practice as well. Please mention that you found them at the Internet Writers Workshop. 

 ____________

 What is a gnat as a person?

A gnat may be used to describe a person that is very much annoying and persistent but no matter what you try, you can't get rid of them. It is derogatory because you are comparing a person to an insect that just won't let you be.

 ____________

Exercise: In 400 words or less, introduce a character that has all the characteristics of an irritating gnat. This person will demonstrate disruptive behavior, and will resist efforts to restore order. Show the disruptive behavior and how this affects your characters. Make sure your characters' words and actions reveal how
this character is perceived.

______________________

Are the other characters successful in dealing with the gnat? Do any perceive the gnat as endearing, intolerable, or something else of your own choosing? Remember to enlighten the reader via character words and behavior.

______________________

Critique: Did the author present a gnat that could be believed? Did the other characters' interactions feel genuine? Were you drawn to the story? Provide suggestions you believe would strengthen the writing or enliven the scene.

 

 Some more writing prompts for you to try.

Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques

 

Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques 

 

(Audio Book)  (PDF)

 

Whether you’re huddled around the campfire, composing an email to a friend, or sitting down to write a novel, storytelling is fundamental to human nature. But as any writer can tell you, the blank page can be daunting. It’s tough to know where to get started, what details to include in each scene, and how to move from the kernel of an idea to a completed manuscript.

Writing great fiction isn’t a gift reserved for the talented few. There is a craft to storytelling that can be learned, and studying the fiction writer’s techniques can be incredibly rewarding—both personally and professionally. Even if you don’t have ambitions of penning the next Moby-Dick, you’ll find value in exploring all the elements of great fiction.

From evoking a scene to charting a plot to selecting a point of view, Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques offers a master class in storytelling. Taught by acclaimed novelist James Hynes, a former visiting professor at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Michigan, these 24 insightful lectures show you the ins and outs of the fiction writer’s craft.

More than just delivering lectures, Professor Hynes offers the first steps of an apprenticeship, showing you not only how fiction works but also how to read like a writer. Here you’ll find explications of novels and stories across the ages:

• Rediscover classics such as Jane Eyre, Bleak House, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, and others.
• Gain new insights into bestsellers such as the Harry Potter and Game of Thrones series.
• Explore the world of literary fiction, from Chekhov’s “The Kiss” to Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.
• Reflect on what makes characters such as Anna Karenina and Sherlock Holmes so memorable.
• Find out how to create suspense like Dashiell Hammett, George Pelecanos, and John le Carré.

In addition to showing you how the elements of fiction work, this course is an interactive toolkit. Professor Hynes closes each lecture with an exercise to get your creative juices flowing. Only you know what story you want to tell, but the many examples and writing prompts in these lectures will get you from thinking about writing to the act of writing—often the toughest part of any project.

Begin with the Basics

William Faulkner once said that writing a novel is like a one-armed man trying to hammer together a chicken coop in a hurricane. That may be an exaggeration, but finding your way into a story can take an equal amount of creative experimentation. In the opening lectures of this course, you will learn how to:

Evoke a Scene: There is a fine art to selecting just the right imagery to bring a scene to life. Whether you’re heeding the old advice to “show, don’t tell,” or you’re seeking to create what novelist John Gardner called a “vivid and continuous dream,” scenic detail is the life-blood of good fiction. Professor Hynes shows you how to choose rich details while keeping your narrative uncluttered.

Develop a Character: When you create a fictional character, you’re creating the illusion of reality—suggesting a real person rather than replicating one. Four lectures on character development teach you how to build characters who think and act in plausible ways. See how novelists such as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, George R.R. Martin, and many others develop their believable and memorable characters.

Craft Great Dialogue: Just as characters are illusions that suggest real people, so too does dialogue suggest authentic speech. Good dialogue serves at least one of a few key functions in a narrative, such as evoking character, advancing the plot, or providing necessary exposition. A two-lecture unit sheds light on balancing dialogue with narration, with examples from the work of Charles Dickens, Alice Munro, and Toni Morrison, as well as the professor’s own fiction.

Build the Story’s Structure

Literature creates order out of chaos. To do so, you need to provide structure to your story, which can be one of the most challenging aspects of writing fiction. Among the topics you’ll study are:

Story versus Plot: Whether it’s a novel, a short story, or a blog post, one of a story’s primary functions is to keep the reader reading. One way to achieve this is by creating a compelling plot. After exploring the difference between “story” and “plot”—as defined by E.M. Forster—Professor Hynes unpacks the many techniques of storytelling, and he concludes this six-lecture unit with some thoughts about keeping momentum in relatively “plotless” fiction such as James Joyce’s “The Dead.”

Point of View: As you’ll see in this three-lecture unit, much of a story hinges on the perspective from which it’s told. From the omniscience of Middlemarch to the free indirect discourse of Light in August, and from the double consciousness of Huck Finn to the unreliable narrator of The Aspern Papers, Professor Hynes surveys the range of narrative possibilities.

Time, Place, and Pace: A story’s setting is a powerful way to create mood. Think of London in Bleak House, or Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Time plays an equally important role in fiction—the era of a story’s setting, the sequence of events that occur, and the timing with which information is revealed to the reader are all pivotal elements. You’ll learn how to syncopate action and exposition, scene and summary, short scenes and long scenes, present-time narrative versus flashbacks, and more.

Drafts and Revisions: All stories must come to an end. In this course’s final unit, you’ll step back from the specific elements of scenic composition and consider the story as a whole. How do you build a complete draft? What are some strategies for revision? And what do you do when you’ve finished?

A Practical Toolkit to Get You Writing

As a working novelist, Professor Hynes is able to imbue his teaching of the elements of fiction with the wisdom of personal experience. He uses vivid examples from the history of literature as well as lessons and anecdotes from his own time in the novel-writing trenches. He shares his personal processes and techniques, and even examines specific examples where he struggled as a writer, revealing how he overcame those difficulties.

But this course is meant to be a toolkit, not an instruction manual. The beauty of fiction writing is that it’s a creative field. There are no right answers, no single way to tell a story. A wealth of exercises will get you writing so that you can practice the many techniques you learn. Along the way, Professor Hynes is an able guide, showing you what has worked for him and other novelists, and pointing out pitfalls to avoid. Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques is truly an exceptional course for anyone interested in storytelling.

 

 Table of Contents

LECTURE GUIDES
INTRODUCTION
Professor Biography ............................................................................i
Course Scope .....................................................................................1
LECTURE 1
Starting the Writing Process ..............................................................4
LECTURE 2
Building Fictional Worlds through Evocation ....................................10
LECTURE 3
How Characters Are Different from People ......................................17
LECTURE 4
Fictional Characters, Imagined and Observed .................................24
LECTURE 5
Call Me Ishmael—Introducing a Character.......................................31
LECTURE 6
Characters—Round and Flat, Major and Minor ................................38
LECTURE 7
The Mechanics of Writing Dialogue ..................................................45
LECTURE 8
Integrating Dialogue into a Narrative ................................................52
LECTURE 9
And Then—Turning a Story into a Plot .............................................59
LECTURE 10
Plotting with the Freytag Pyramid .....................................................65

LECTURE 11
Adding Complexity to Plots...............................................................72
LECTURE 12
Structuring a Narrative without a Plot ...............................................78
LECTURE 13
In the Beginning—How to Start a Plot ..............................................84
LECTURE 14
Happily Ever After—How to End a Plot ............................................90
LECTURE 15
Seeing through Other Eyes—Point of View......................................97
LECTURE 16
I, Me, Mine—First-Person Point of View.........................................104
LECTURE 17
He, She, It—Third-Person Point of View ........................................ 111
LECTURE 18
Evoking Setting and Place in Fiction .............................................. 118
LECTURE 19
Pacing in Scenes and Narratives ...................................................125
LECTURE 20
Building Scenes ..............................................................................132
LECTURE 21
Should I Write in Drafts?.................................................................139
LECTURE 22
Revision without Tears....................................................................145
LECTURE 23
Approaches to Researching Fiction................................................152

Making a Life as a Fiction Writer ....................................................159
Appendix: Punctuating Dialogue ....................................................165
Bibliography ............................................................................169

 

About the Author 

Writer James Hynes loves cats and has worked them into several of his publications, including his collection of three novellas entitled Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror. A combination of horror story and academic satire, Publish and Perish was the result of Hynes yearning to create horror stories in the vein of Edgar Allen Poe and M.R. James. Hynes first gained national attention in 1990 with the publication of The Wild Colonial Boy. In addition, his essays on television criticism have appeared in Mother Jones and Utne Reader.

James Hynes at Amazon

A Quick Note on Writing Science Fiction for the Novice Writer by Ryker J. Phoenix

 

 A Quick Note on Writing Science Fiction for the Novice Writer

 

by Ryker J. Phoenix

 

"Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible."

-- Ray Bradbury

 Science fiction is one of the most popular genres of writing today. It is a genre that is constantly evolving, and the possibilities are endless. It is a genre that can be used to explore social issues, and it can be used to explore the future.

Science fiction can be used to explore the future by looking at social issues. For example, a writer might explore the issue of climate change by looking at the future and how it might impact the environment. Alternatively, a writer might explore the issue of technology by looking at the future and how it might impact society.

Elements of Science Fiction

• Realistic and fantastic details
•  Grounded in science
•  Usually set in the future
•  Unknown inventions
•  Makes a serious comment about the world
•  Often contains a warning for humankind

Science Fiction Settings

• Another planet
•  Under the oceans
•  Another dimension of existence
•  May be a utopia or dystopia
•  May be in the future
•  May time travel to the past (or future)
•  May take place in present, but alternate reality

Science Fiction Characters

• Protagonist (Hero)
•  Antagonist (Villain)
•  These characters may be a being (human or other) or may be a force
•  Protagonist or Antagonist may be society’s laws, a disease or other problem, technology, etc.
•  Creatures, robots, aliens, etc. Science is Important to the Story
•  Advanced technology
•  Genetics
•  Disease
•  Exploration
•  Special powers or senses as a result of science
•  Science can be the savior or the root of the problem

Message or Warning for Humans

• Science Fiction stories often contain a message or warning
•  Think of the message Ray Bradbury was trying to send in Fahrenheit 451

Science is Important to the Story

• Advanced technology
•  Genetics
•  Disease
•  Exploration
•  Special powers or senses as a result of science
•  Science can be the savior or the root of the problem

 

"Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision."

-- Marion Zimmer Bradley

 Writing science fiction can feel daunting, but it’s also a fulfilling and enlightening process. Use this and the website below as your guide, and you’re well on your way to pulling together your first story.

 Also see:

• Writing Science Fiction: The Ultimate Guide

 

 More Quick Notes for the Novice Writer