Product Description

CREATIVITY SOFTW NEWNOVELIST . UK

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1446 in Software
• Brand: Creativity Software
• Released on: 2002-03-08
• Platforms: Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows 95
• Dimensions: .22 pounds

Amazon.co.uk Review
The idea that creative writing cannot be taught seems to be challenged by recent history. The creative writing course at Norwich, for instance, has produced authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Andrew Miller; the latest attempt to impart the "rules of fiction" is Newnovelist--Start Writing Your Novel, a CD-ROM designed to assist the aspiring writer's learning curve.

Newnovelist aims to help writers hone their ideas, guiding them first to select the concept of their book, and then its category--be it an epic narrative, plot-driven or character-driven. After further honing the idea into a type of story (whether the tale is driven by a chase motif or revenge, for instance) the package gives tutorials on essential elements in creating the atmosphere of the novel and helping to picture the world that the characters inhabit. The final stage is to move from this to the creation of the story itself, with advice on the passages that will be necessary to realise the world and the characters successfully.

There is much that is valuable here in terms of plot and character, but some elements of the package are less helpful, particularly the section that asks the writer to give a one-line summary of their proposed book--nothing is more infuriating or awkward for an author than being asked to describe their book in half a dozen words. There is also no concentration on the importance of writing from inspiration and experience, and scant reference to the significance of prose style; in the end, without these elements, NewNovelist--Start Writing Your Novel can only be a piecemeal addition to the growing "industry" of teaching creative writing, although its tips on character and plot may well be helpful to some. --Toby Green

Manufacturer's Description
Newnovelist takes you on a journey. It harnesses your creativity, and helps you write your own novel.

By providing you with story creation steps, newnovelist breaks the writing process down into manageable chunks. You are provided with suggestions on how to use the steps, and the tempo to adopt; the degree of suspense to maintain, even the amount of time you might use for each element of your story. It prompts and suggests so you are never left alone with a blank screen or sheet of paper. You can keep track of notes that you make yourself, and store research notes and references that are easy to retrieve.

You can do all of this in the knowledge that newnovelist is maintaining a coherent plan for your story. The software provides you with freedom of expression that you want, within a logical framework that you need. So you can focus creativity and energy on the storytelling, and let us worry about structure.

Start a novel today. Start a dozen. Develop one character or a thousand. The only limit is your imagination!

Customer Reviews

Very poor
NewNovelist is a good idea, but the software is so riddled with bugs that it becomes unusable. For a start it will often lose the information you've stored in one of its files, so you lose every bit of work you've done.

Aside from the bugs, the idea of actually writing in this is laughable. There are no word-processing capabilities whatsoever. You can't change the font, font-size, use bullet-points, or anything. If you do write something you can't export it. You can only save it and open it in NN. You can't format your work, so you'd never want to submit it to a publisher! You can't even right-click in the text window should you want to copy and paste something!

Given that I paid £30 for it, I feel very ripped off. Don't buy this, just make your notes on paper and write your novel in Word.

New Novelist review
I bought this a few years back now and i noticed that this program is buggy and after a while you can't be bothered to put up with its errors anymore.
your probably better off just using word or something similiar. Seriously don't waste your money on junk like this.
you'll regret it.
i mean there is no spellcheck.
sometimes there is only so much you can write - (nn stops you from writing!?)
help feature sucks coz it doesn't help you.
and if you try to call up customer services to get the pin to unlock you wont get through EVER!
just use word - seriously!
new novelist is CRAP!

Good idea, poorly executed
On the plus side, this software helps me with what I wanted it to help me with. A big plus. It forces you to consider character in detail, story type and structure, the importance of location and several other facets of good story telling.

The big negative is that you can't access any of this in a printed, or even a comprehensive onscreen, report. That's right - you can spend hours detailing all aspects of your major and minor characters, only to find that the information is trapped in fairly unhelpful units in the software.

The really annoying thing is that the software itself claims that such reports can be generated. After an hour of head-scratching I called the company helpline and asked how I did this. The polite man on the other end of the phone admitted I'd stumbled on a 'hot potato', and that such reports couldn't be produced at the moment. An upgrade/patch is expected by the end of the year.

Until such a patch arrives, I'm loathe to invest time in the creation of data which I can't access in any useful form.

This is very disappointing, as the software itself is really rather good, and exceedingly useful, but until it's been improved I'm off to look at other options.