A few months ago, I started looking at the free tools for writers available for Linux OS to help me structure some of the idea strings for a #Scifi story I'd been forming in my head. I was getting inspiration from several sources like The Expanse (TV show and novels), Mission to Zyxx (a long-form, improvised, science-fiction comedy podcast), and a little-known gem of a campy, 'blue collar' scifi comedy movie called Space Truckers and really wanted to try to pull together some of my ideas. I'd tried FocusWriter, meant to help cut distraction, and it was great for free writing practice, but not for real structuring.
I starting looking through the Mint (the distro I use) software manager and found Plume Creator and Manuskript. Both have their merits and unique functions, but they weren't quite helping me "out of the box" in the way I needed to help bring the project out of my head.
Then came Bibisco. Actually, this is out of order... I already had downloaded the
"community edition" last year, but hadn't really given it a go before the others. I ran it, gave my initial project a name and opened it.
The opening screen presents some tips on characters, conflict, premise; mostly basic stuff, but it is nice to have a reference page with such fundamentals. The menu items across the top each open a page full of more options. The first tab, Architecture, gives further options helping lay out premise, fabula, setting, and someplace to start capturing narrative strands.
From the Bibisco website:
On the next tab, Characters, separates out main and secondary characters. But more than that, when a new main character is created, Bibisco offers even more.
This is exactly what I was looking for and didn't even know it but not finding in the other writers' tools. As the about page on the website said, novels will work when characters are believable. So like a software wizard helping you set up a new program, after giving a character a name and creating it's page, Bibisco offers questionnaires that help bring every aspect and dimension of the character, most of which I hadn't even considered, but could see immediately the benefit for subtext.
I found spaces to copy the free writing about my story as narrative strands and started building my characters and locations important to my story. The 'community edition' of Bibisco was working fine for my purposes at first since I wasn't writing chapters yet and didn't even need the timeline feature yet.
I have since become a supporter and upgraded my version to the supporter's edition. The main motivation for the upgrade, at first, was dark theme, but once I had access to the Objects, Timeline, and Global Notes sections, I was even more impressed with the features Bibisco provides writers. I still would've paid something to have the dark theme, if it was the only difference in the two editions. My wife like to watch TV in bed before falling asleep, but she has to get up much earlier than me, so she was getting annoyed by the light from my laptop when I brought it into the bedroom to keep working; dark theme has fixed that.
So that's my positive review for Bibisco! If you decide to check it out, let me know what you think and your favorite features!
