LitLift – A Software Application For Novel Writers

I’ve just happened across this rather interesting software for writers. It’s called LitLift and its aim is to keep you organised as you create your masterpiece. It’s not a wordprocessing package, but a helpful tool to help you keep on top of the details of your creation. It was developed by Brad Marsh, a UX designer and developer who is also a writer. And he’s made LitLift available for free.

So how does it work? OK, first you create your account with your name and password. The main page comes up with tabs for Books, Characters, Settings, Items and Tools.

Books: you enter the title and a description of what it’s going to be about.

Characters: there are three tabs to start with – All Characters, Major Characters and Minor Characters. Highlight the category you want, and then click on the New Character box on the right. This brings you to a page where you enter the name, their status (major, minor etc) and a description. There’s a useful list of features to consider in your description eg  hobbies, education and so on. If you’re stuck, there’s a button that will generate a character for you! I was offered Wayne Hall, Cullen Ross and a couple of others. Rather useful, that.

Settings: you give a name and description of your setting.

Items: this is to help you keep track of who last had what – the murder weapon, the heiress’s poodle … it’s easy to lose tabs sometimes so this is a nice little feature.

Tools: this is the character generator I talked about earlier. There’s a note saying more features will be coming soon, but I’m not sure how recently that was put up.

I shall be certainly give LitLift a whirl with my next new fiction venture (starting imminently). I find I lose track of characters quite easily, and when it comes to naming them, I seem to have a fairly small pool of names that spring to mind. I end up with multiple Robs and Simons.

Thanks Brad – this is a well thought out and handy program.