Writing Software Challenges

I used Dramatica software to develop a few movie ideas.  I chose this software because it allowed for development of writing projects that could be populated into a screen writing program or a book format for publishing.  It was exciting to use this software at the beginning as I went along trying to answer certain questions and deciding on the criteria for the outline of my movie ideas.  I went along throughout until one day I got to the end of one movie idea.   The way this software worked is that you develop the number of characters you want and you give them a role in the movie and based on what you want your characters to do and the overall theme of your movie it would take you down a certain path in the program.

I went through the review of what I had finished. During the review process I found that there were sections of the software program which were not completed.  I started addressing those sections.  This is when the fun stopped.  I wasn't sure if I was doing the right thing by trying to address all of the sections of the software or whether I was already ready to go to either Movie Magic Screenwriter or Final Draft.  While I was looking at the pros and cons of these screen writing software programs I plodded along in a quest to address all areas of the Dramatica program. Somehow during this process I had a long delay in completing as I was pretty close to finishing this one movie idea and I had outlined a couple of other ideas.  Then my hard drive crashed and gone was the program even though I had saved a ".pdf" version of my projects.  You already know the rest of the story as this was the straw that broke the camels back.  I found it hard to think about starting over again and buying this program again as I didn't have a backup copy since I paid to have it downloaded directly to my laptop.

So I learned the hard way.  In the future I will be more diligent in getting a better insight into a software program before investing a lot of time, energy and money into it.