Much like when I did my keyboard piece (which, as a writer, you definitely should check out if you write on your tablet a lot), I went into this article looking for an array of apps that would benefit a writer. I looked at the cream of the crop for the aspiring writer on a budget, and… this one about covers it. Beyond writing the actual story for you, Character Planner helps you handle a lot of the leg work in a reasonable, intuitive manner. While the name implies it merely relates to drafting character sheets, it does so much more.
You can flesh out lore, characters, locations, the overall synopsis of the story – even lay out individual scenes with notes for the character POV, the intent of the scene, and more. Not only does it offer the structure and flexibility to cover all these key aspects of streamlining the outline of your narrative, but it asks questions with each detail. It sparks thoughts in your head by asking you things you might have taken for granted, making you really think about it. These detail lists aren’t limited to basics like ethnicity and role in the story either. You’ll be asked about appearance, backstory, culture, politics, and supernatural abilities, among others. None of this forces you to fit in a specific genre – in fact, you can leave any inapplicable space blank without an issue – and is built flexibly enough to be the groundwork for a modern day romance novel or a gripping sci-fi epic to rival Star Wars. You can also easily assign pictures to your characters and locales – even a work in progress book cover for the story itself, should it please you.
Credit must also be given to the user-interface, which is very slickly executed and is no-frills in presentation. You get what you need, and can easily access whatever you’re searching for. When you have any entity, like a character or location, open, then you can simply slide left and right to pour through the various lists to refresh your memory or make adjustments. You can also neatly assign characters, locations, scenes, items, and more into one another, ensuring all the necessary information for each part of the story is right at hand and neatly displayed. There’s also no contrived limitations or other headache resulting from the app being free – there’s a tiny banner for ads at the very bottom of the app, that’s all. Non-intrusive and respectful to your needs.
The only aspect to the app I genuinely have a problem with is the lack of the ability to slide various entities around in their lists. The search function is a fine alternative, but would it be -that- hard to just let us hold and drag scenes and characters around as we want? Might be something developer Infantasia should keep in mind for the future.
Despite this, Character Story Planner is simply fantastic. It’s a great option for writers and role-players, and I’m looking forward to making use of it in my own stories. Ifantasia have done a marvelous job with this app. It’s a shame it’s not on iOS, but if you’re Mac only, there is Story Planner for Writers for $4.
[appbox googleplay com.lfantasia.android.outworld]
