Write a story
Every writer has their own way of creating a story. Some writers like to plan all/part of a story before they start writing. Others dive write in and start writing. Still others mix and match. Writing Shed lets you adopt any of these approaches.
For now though, to keep things simple, we will follow the second path. So, the first thing is to create a new draft story.
Create draft:
Make sure that the Draft item is selected (highlighted in grey), if not just click on it. Then click on the toolbar button labelled New. A dialog will popup in the window where you can enter the name of the story.
Let’s call it ‘My First Story”. Enter this then click Add to create the new story.
The window changes to reflect the new context.
The toolbar buttons change.
The navigation panel expands the Drafts item with the name of the new story, and the number in brackets changes to 1 to show the number of stories in the project. You will also notice that the arrow now points downwards to indicate that the Drafts item is in its expanded state. Clicking the arrow will return it to its collapsed state.
A typing area appears containing a blank sheet of paper (the typing area is outlined with a grey line). There is a ruler at the top containing a collection of formatting controls.
A new panel appears on the right. This is the Information Inspector. You can hide/show this by clicking the Info button in the toolbar. More about this later.
Add text
You are now ready to start writing your story. Click inside the typing area and start typing. For demonstration purposes I have entered some well-known Latin doggerel. Note that there is no need to save the text entered for a draft. Saving is automatic.
If you don’t like leaping in to write a story without first doing some planning, then maybe writing an outline is for you. We’ll leave the details of this until later, but have a look at the next section to get a taste of what’s involved.
An important feature of Writing Shed is it’s ability to support multiple versions of a story. See Versions for more details.