Recently, I did one of my periodic searches around the internet for other writing software. There’s a lot out there, and some of it is interesting. None of it really compares to Scrivener!
I did give this software a fair shake. I’ve tried it several times, and it fell flat for me for a number of reasons.
High learning Curve. There are die-hard Story Binder users out there who love this program. They are far outnumbered by Scrivener addicts, but still, there are die hards. They would tell me I didn’t really conquer the learning curve, and they’re right. LSB has a dizzying array of functions and features, but no really easy way to just plug in and start typing.
With Scrivener and Writeway, you just create a project from a template, open a scene and start typing. Writeway adds to the complexity by its add on styles (I never really messed with them). But LSB has containers, and associations, and… It’s a little harder to get into it and just write.
If you decided to play with LSB and bought it, you’d have to really dedicate a serious month to learning how to change the look of it (I feel like I’m in some kind of creepy horror movie, with dark grays and lighter grays, and stark white), and then learn how to use it. Then you’d need to really understand associations and containers.
Like Scrivener, there’s a couple of different ways to do everything. I did spend some serious time going through the tutorials on how to learn LSB, but even with those, I felt like the program was overly complex. If you feel like Scrivener doesn’t give you enough complexity (and Scrivener’s got a lot of functions that you can poke with), LSB might well be for you!
Odd Terms for functions. This one more than anything was why I really couldn’t give LSB a fair shake. Call a container a workspace, tile or a screen – those are industry standard kinds of names. Call it a scene. Call it a chapter. Give me easy ways to create a scene and a chapter. Why do I have to make a container to put the chapters in? Just give me a default screen or workspace, and a way to create chapters and scenes quickly!
Calling something an association is a wrong title for something. Association already has a default meaning in computers – it means “the software that opens this kind of file.” Like we know that a PDF’s association is Adobe Acrobat, or any other PDF reader. By taking an established term and sticking it in another manner to the program increases frustration levels.
Visual thinkers. For visual thinkers, people who need to really see their environments and their cast, LSB actually does this better than Scrivener. There’s a way to write your character bio’s, and then import an image of that person. Scrivener of course does this too – but LSB gives you the option to see the characters and the bios of the entire cast at once. And the larger image size in the locations gallery does give you a much better way to see your locations.
The cards on a Scrivener cork board are limited in size, and so in this case LSB does this better.
And if you like setting up specific playlists for books, you can store them in LSB and it will open Windows Media player and play the music you have for this writing project. However, I could just set up a playlist in Media player or Media Monkey and do that as well.
Conclusion. I’ve given this program I think two months? It wasn’t dedicated “write a book in it” two months, because the learning curve is so steep I just didn’t have a month to just LEARN the program. I need to get right into the planning and writing aspect of it. So my feeling is that LSB is going to frustrate more writers than appeal to them. Once you get the hang of the odd terminology and structure, it’s probably amazing. But I just don’t have the time to dedicate to learning an overcomplicated program.
