Power Structure is the latest shiny new toy I’ve been playing with. Essentially, it’s an outlining tool with some very nice features. It lets me organize my outlining thoughts the way I want to. It’s not trying to write my story for me, or even help me come up with ideas. It allows me to structure my ideas in a better way.

One of my favorite features is that it allows me to rename all the key terms in an outline. If I don’t like “plot points”, I can rename that to “story event” or “scene”. If I don’t like “protagonist” I can rename that to “hero”.

Their novel template uses acts, chapters, and plot points (but remember, you can rename those terms if you want!). You can move plot points to other chapters, and chapters to other acts, but this becomes a little cumbersome if you have a lot to move. You can put in as much detail to an act, chapter and plot point as you wish. You can view the plot points as index cards, and shuffle them around. You can track plot points by character(s) and your own custom categories. You can assign tension level to plot points, and view graphs of the tension over time (kinda neat, but I’m not sure I’ll use this feature).

You can define “to do” items for an act or chapter, and check them off (very conveniently) as you create the plot point that will include that item.

You can define all your characters, provide as much detail as you want, categorize them, and associate them with your plot points (chapters and acts). You can define their “character arc” and track it throughout the story.

Gestalt View

You have a “gestalt” view, which is simply a view that displays acts, chapters and plot points all in one screen, with acts in the leftmost column, chapters in the next column, then plot points, and finally plot point details. Very handy for a more graphical layout of the entire structure. I have a large widescreen monitor, and I think this view may seem more cluttered on smaller conventional monitors.

Realistically, you won’t be using all the features. But the unused features don’t seem to get in the way.

At $129.95, it may be a little pricey for some. There’s a free demo (limited by # of plot points and no thesaurus) you can try out. I’m having fun with it so far. Whether it will become a regular tool in my writing, I can’t yet say.

Be forewarned, this program comes with copy protection, where you can register up to three machines for it to work on. You can unregister a machine. If your hard drive crashes or you forget to unregister a machine (and then lose access to that machine), call them up and they’ll work something out with you. My concern is what happens when they go out of business. You can still use the software, but you’ll have to enter your “key” every time you run the program. I realize software piracy is a problem, but I’m not a big fan of companies incoveniencing paying customers to try and circumvent it.

Here’s some reviews by Thomas Kane, Top Ten Reviews, and Sandra Durham.

The company is hard at work on version 2 of this program.