Fantasy Writers: Tools of the Trade

No longer do we live in the era of writers sitting over a notepad or a typewriter cranking out page after page. While I'm sure they still exist, the majority of writers these days work electronically. This is why you can find numerous writing tools on the internet to assist writers with their endeavors. There are a few specific writing programs available that will assist fantasy writers to create their masterpieces.

yWriter is a specialized word processor that you write your book directly into. It divides up into chapters, scenes, characters and plot elements. It gives you the ability to drag and drop your chapters and scenes as well as characters into the narrative. The advantage to this is it breaks up each unit into something that is workable. Instead of looking at a blank page with the knowledge you have hundreds more to go, you can work on it scene by scene or chapter by chapter. It almost seems like an index card approach.

Auto Realm is a world building mapping software. Many fantasy writers have a difficult time creating maps for their world building. If you couldn't draw a straight line with a pencil and a ruler, consider using this program for generating reference maps. It works similar to other photo shop or paint type programs except you can add thumbnail photos such as mountains or trees into the picture.

Freemind is a mind mapping software. This software is very helpful to fantasy writers to help generate ideas. Another use for this is for those fantasy writers who don't work well with lists; this is a good tool to use for outlining your story. You create individual nodes and then add nodes off shooting those. You can also add notes to each node as well as put in hyperlinks into other documents on your computer. This is useful if you are referencing a particular document in your mind map. Another plus to this software is they have developed a Freemind Lite application in the iTunes App store so you can take your mind maps with you.

Each of these software programs can be found by doing a web search for the name of each software. From there you will just need to download them to your computer. The best thing about each of these programs is that they are completely free. That's right. They cost nothing to try. Trying to be a fantasy writer is difficult work. So, why don't you try them? You really do have nothing to lose.