Literature and Latte has developed an authoring software for creative writing on the Mac, which is called Scrivener. It lets you create bits and pieces of your text as a draft, and gather other pieces of media (text, photos) to base your work on as a resource. After you’ve finished the draft, you compile it into a final version for external review or publishing. I haven’t gone through the tutorial yet, but it seems very promising.
I already have an idea for a first project, a cross between the A-Team and Star Trek. I should get my inspiration from watching old episodes of those TV shows and mix them together into something completely different. I’m told it is one of the best ways to enter the field of story writing, because most of the work has already been done by others, and you only have to do light work to create a new story.
A good site to publish your fan fiction writing on is FanFiction.net. However, I don’t think one should publish one’s very first story there, but rather write several stories and pick the best one for review on such sites. Even then, be prepared to get some serious feedback from experienced fan fiction authors. That is, I guess, the exact reason why you publish on such peer review sites, to get positive critique, so you can improve.
Of course, Scrivener will not tell you how to write. It is just a tool to enable a particular method of creative writing. People who prefer developing a text in their heads first and then write the whole text in one go should look elsewhere. Scrivener is for the rest of us, who organically develop their story.
At least, that is my first impression of the software and its intended users.
That is all.
