LitLift

I’ve discovered a new online writing resource for novelists that is really quite well done.  LitLift has tools to help brainstorming your novel, structuring it, organizing your notes and writing it. You can develop — and write — the whole thing right there online. You can add chapters, scenes, characters, settings…it will help you track where something is, if there’s some detail that you need to track through the book. I wish now I’d known about it before I started brainstorming my most recent manuscript. The Writing Guide and Plotline features are pretty good. The character development has a list of traits and background that you can fill in. Or…you can use their random character generator which is a nifty tool for sparking the imagination: you can select it to generate a number of boy/girl names, and also a general description of what type of person they are, likes and dislikes, traits. The descriptions are so evocative that stories sort of leap out from them. The location generator can either give you totally fictional names or actual place names. Fun! The title generator is a bit generic, but there’s also a random word generator which could be useful in writing prompt type challenges.

All in all, it looks like an excellent way to organize a novel from the first stages on through rewrites. You can create scenes or characters which aren’t attached to any project, but can be later attached to work in progress.  You can add/remove scenes, characters, settings, and items to any project. You can also export your work as txt, rtf, or epub. I’m using it to play around with some ideas just to see how it works. All material you create on Litlift is private unless you add something to the Library which will make your story/chapters/book available to others on Litlift for review and comments, or you can make it completely public (though only Litlift members can comment). If you wanted to play around with serialization, this might be a good way to do it without muddling up your blog with an assortment of posts and chapters. This would be a really excellent resource for people prepping for NaNoWriMo. Next time I do NaNo, this is what I’m using for NaNo prep!