Review -The Literary Machine

The Literary Machine is a bit of a misnomer for this powerful piece of software - while it is certainly applicable to the writing process, it is much more an information and thoughts organiser that can be used to store away anything from snippets of information to full scale documents and pull them together to meet a particular requirement.

It's one of those pieces of software that you will either love or hate. Either way, you will have to invest quite a lot of effort up front, in part because this is a complex and powerful piece of software and also because it has limited value until you have built up a reasonable database of text - and that will take a fair amount of time and effort.

Once you have got over the initial learning (it might be worth checking out the Literary Machine resources at the Operation Doubles website) and plugged in plenty of material, the software begins working for you. Keywords and concepts can be used to trigger collections of text, manipulate ideas, pull them together, restructure them and produce a new and original output.

There is one snag. When I used to build databases a number of years ago, I would build a database around a particular personal set of requirements - for example to do my accounting. It works great for me, because it follows the way I think, it reacts the way I anticipate. It's absolutely rubbish for anyone else, because it is too well tailored to my special requirements. There's something of a feeling of this about the Literary Machine - it feels like a piece of software that has gradually grown around one individual's personal requirements, and it just doesn't work the way I like to work. I could be wrong. And, of course it could work exactly the way you like to work - but this is a concern for me. One of the signs of this for me is there's too much explanation and definition before you can use it: the concepts don't come naturally.

Is this a killer problem? Not at all - because it really might be exactly what you need. The good news is there's a freeware version (LM 2000) you can download from the LM website (see below) and give it a try. If you like it, there's also a (still very reasonable) Pro version with lots of other good features.

I personally work well by playing around with ideas using a mind mapper (see our idea structuring page), then really only taking chapter headings from there and writing as a separate process - and this might suit you better too - either way, the only thing to do is to give these options a try, because find the right tool for you and it will transform your creative work.

Download now

The Literary Machine 2000 version is available for download from the Literary Machine website. You can also see more about the more advanced Pro version.