Others say...

"A JUMP START TO MY WRITING"
I looked to this product to give me a little push and shove into writing more and organizing my thoughts. So far, it has worked out pretty well for me. It has made me consider in more detail my character developments and conflicts. Don't expect it to write for you, but if you are looking for some organization it is well worth the price.

"Junk."
I suggest saving yourself the $34.49 and instead investing in a Bickpen and one of those little black journals we used in school. All this program is good for is keeping a record of character, plot and motivation. Frankly, all you need is a couple pieces of paper for that.

"Restrictive and time-consuming"
The problem with most novel-writing software I've been testing is that they involve a lot of "writing before the writing." While some planning is good, the amount of data entry these programs require detract from getting actual pages written, and the reality is that all those plans will likely change as you write anyway.

This program is no exception. I find all the initial set-up to be cumbersome without yielding benefits that might ultimately actually streamline my process in the weeks or months ahead. (By contrast, for example, Final Draft - a screenwriting program - stores your characters' names so that you only need to type the first few letters and press Enter. You can also toggle your scenes from script to outline and back again without re-entering the information.)

As for the more theoretic stuff, the story prompts are clearly taken from screenwriting which is formulaic due to the time contraints of a film. (For example, the lengths of scenes, act breaks, and total number of pages are far more restrictive to fit a 120-minute film than the scenes, chapters, and total pages of a novel.)

Because a novel can be far longer than a 120-page screenplay, there's little here for creating stories with complex plots, for tracking subplots, or for creating backstory for characters. Instead you get a generic list of 'themes,' some of which are surprising vague.

If you have little or no idea where your story is going yet, or if you're a writer whose work evolves, this program will be more hindrance than help. If you're the meticulous type who likes details of the minutae and rarely deviate from your outline once it's set, this may help you.


"Ironing out the details"
Writer's DreamKit is not hard to use, I simply followed the instructions given at the beginning of each section and kept going. It wasn't easy. I really had to think about my story and characters and if there was a deeper meaning to my story. I had to press through areas that I thought were boring or that I really didn't want to think about and was rewarded with a much better concept and deeper characters that were much more interesting than the motley crew I started out with.

Is it worth the $$$$ I think so. I never was any good at outlining and this program not only helped me out there but helped me create something better and more interesting to outline.

"Just sit down and write."
Want to waste a lot of time when you could be writing your masterpiece? Buy this "program". Face the facts: There simply is no software that's going to write a book for you or anyone else, including me. I screwed around for several days with this thing. Then I got the final print out of "how" I should write my novel. It was impossible for me to follow the "guidelines" provided. They simply did not pertain to the way I wanted to write my story. I tried to imagine some of my favorite books having been written using the generic guidelines the program produced. It assumes that all fiction novel writing is generic and takes the form that the producer of the program dictates. I feel that each and every successful fiction writer has their own individual writing traits and point of view on how they themselves (not F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Mark Twain, John Grisham, etc, etc) should produce a work of art. JUST WRITE! Don't give up. That's my free advice and it's worth more than anything this software has to offer.