In my fiction writing, I use a nifty little piece of shareware called Copywrite. It’s built by Bartas Technologies, a Macintosh developer that “strives to provide simple, focused, and well-polished software applications…software with a personal touch.”

Before settling on Copywrite, I demo’ed most of the available word-processing software for the Mac. Some of the them were a little better than Copywrite, but those were also more expensive. When everything was said and done in the comparison of pros and cons, Copywrite came out on top.

Copywrite basically works like this. The application creates a single container for all the different documents you might use while writing a novel. You can categorize those documents in anyway you want. For example, I have documents in the following categories:

• Chapters
• Characters
• Places
• Elements
• Ideas
• Premise

On top of managing the documents for me, Copywrite also allows me to assign a status to them; for example, “new,” “rough,” “second,” and “final.” I know I could probably accomplish much of the same thing using folders and labels in the Macintosh Finder, but Copywrite puts all of it into a single window for me. It’s kind of like iTunes for your writing files.

Perhaps its best feature, however, is its full-screen mode, which gets everything on my computer out of the way and shows me nothing but the words on the page. This isn’t exclusive to Copywrite, but it is included in the application, and for a dude who is as addicted to multitasking as I am, full-screen mode is just a god-send.

Anyway, as some of you know and as all of you can now tell, I’m in the process of writing a novel. It’s kind of a complex story, told with at least three distinct parts, and contains what is starting to add up to a whole host of characters. For the last two days, instead of adding words to the story, instead of working on its chapters, I’ve been spending my “writing time” doing a bit of organizational housework, playing in some of those other categories I mentioned above.

One of the things I’m doing is putting together a document for each of the characters in the story. Each document contains things such as the character’s role in the story, the plot details they contribute to, their physical description, any specifics about family and friends, their occupation, etc. I’m also trying to keep a rolling index of key sentences that I’ve written about them, sentences that may help me remember, dozens of pages from now, that I described a particular character as “the type of person who wanted to make other people feel like they were the center of attention for a little while, because that’s what she always wanted to be.”

As you can imagine, putting together these documents, and maintaining them once they exist, takes a significant amount of time (especially the key sentences thing). But it shouldn’t have to. Copywrite should be able to automate much of the process for me. The only problem is that it doesn’t.

So here’s my idea, Mr. Bartas Technologies, if you’re listening. Give your users the ability to create “smart documents,” similar to the way iTunes lets us create smart playlists and the Mac lets us create smart folders. Let us set up a document that automatically contains all the uses of a particular word, say a character or place name. Copywrite already has an integrated search engine, so all you’d be doing is centralizing the results of that search into its own document, plus, you know, making it dynamic, so that every time the user clicks on the document, it automatically updates, just like Mac’s smart folders.

And that’s my idea. Get to it, would ya :-)