In the analog age, before starting a screenplay it was almost compulsory to lay the story out on a series of index cards pinned to a cork board. But in the digital realm there are excellent software applications that serve the same purpose. And while they may not have the tactile appeal of manually shifting index cards around, the organizational features they offer may make you throw out your push pins for good.
Writer's Blocks
Writer's Blocks (Ashley Software, $149) has a no-frills look when it starts up. Little more than a big, blank white expanse. But what it represents is a seemingly infinite cork board where "blocks" can be created and positioned.
Each block can contain as little as a few words or as much as a few pages of text. Blocks can be color-coded and automatically arranged by color. They can be auto-numbered and re-numbered as they are moved around. They can be sorted into columns to suit the structure of the screenplay--columns could be "rising action", "bad guys close in", etc. It's all exceedingly helpful in getting a writer's thoughts into an orderly layout. And Writer's Blocks also includes a full-featured word processor with screenplay formatting. It's not a full substitute for Final Draft or Movie Magic, but it does allow the writer to get all manner of creative work done in a single application.
Writer's Blocks is a little slow at times. It's hard to understand, in this age of dual core processors, why simply re-sizing fifty little blocks of text requires ten seconds of calculation complete with a progress bar. And its interface is sparse at best. But for the writer who likes to throw every idea down at once and then organize them after, it's an exceedingly useful organizational tool.
Writer's Cafe
Writer's Cafe (Anthemion Software, $45.00 download, $65.00 CD) takes a different approach. Its interface is pretty, and designed to resemble a desktop. Icons are laid out to launch a host of creative tools: a journal, a scrapbook, a notebook, a pinboard, etc. It's all designed to be a repository for every idea and thought, an inspirational space.
The virtual cork board within Writer's Cafe is called "Storylines". It's a little more rigidly structured than Writer's Blocks, and can take a while to get your head around. It starts with a story hierarchy, breaking it down into acts, sequences, and scenes (or, in the case of fiction, sections and chapters or whatever is desired), each represented by a level within the editor, and each level has its own set of cards. So the top-level acts are laid out on a few cards, then the sequences on a deeper layer of cards, and the scenes on still another deeper layer.
Writer's Cafe includes some fairly useless features, like a random "Writing Prompt" generator ("Write a story about a character named Bob and a collapsing house" might be one). But it also includes some exceedingly useful ones, like a library of character names and a dictionary. Its layout is appealing and intuitive, and the Storylines cork board is tremendously powerful once the paradigm becomes familiar.
Which to Choose
Which software is right for you depends largely on how you like to work. If you're the kind of writer who likes to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, then Writer's Blocks will probably work for you. It allows a random scattering of any number of cards which are then organized after the fact. If, on the other hand, you work in a more structured fashion right from the start, and already have a general sense of your story, then Writer's Cafe might be the better choice.
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