Story-scientists, word-wizards, and tale-titans everywhere agree: all the best stories emerge from the same universal principles of Storybuilding, Storycraft, and Storytelling. But every writer and storyteller will approach the process differently – VocaTales has made it our mission to provide tools and features that address all the challenges of the three stages of storytelling, and work for any writer, no matter their unique creative process. Read on for a compilation of VocaTales’ Featured Features – each with a description of the tools we provide to help you meet specific storytelling challenges, and how they can be adapted to your personal style and process.

Featured Feature: Write in 3D

The process of storybuilding is the foundation of all great writing – and the foundation of storybuilding on VocaTales is our full integrated document/storyboard: with every one of our visual storyboarding tools fully interconnected with your text document, it’s easier than ever to brainstorm, plan, organize, and build your story however you want to.

Traditional Writing – With a Twist

VocaTales text editor will feel familiar from the get-go – it contains all the same tools you’d find on a typical word-processor, from formatting to highlighting to inline commenting. But unlike any other word-processor out there, traditional documents on VocaTales are designed for effortless conversion into a visual mind-map/storyboard view. Simply organize your text into different sections and subsections (“Chapters” and “Scenes”) and then drag these directly onto your board to take advantage of toolsets for outlining, arranging, and collaborating only possible in a visual format.

Fully Flexible, Entirely Adaptable Storyboards

Every chapter and scene that appears on a VocaTales storyboard is linked directly back to your original document – that means you can brainstorm, visualize, plan, take notes, and organize however you see fit, without ever disrupting the flow of your writing. Just click the relevant node on your storyboard and teleport directly to the corresponding section of your document, or navigate back to a storyboard from doc-view by selecting a board tab from the top of your screen. There’s no right or wrong way to use our storyboards – you can build stories your way by drawing, taking notes, embedding media, arranging and rearranging drafts, editing scenes, and dragging finished sections into the proper sequence; whatever your personal workflow, VocaTales will make it smooth as can be. And with the ability to create multiple boards for every story, each furnished with dedicated toolsets for visualizing elements of craft, drilling down on details, and requesting/receiving targeted feedback, the possibilities for every storyboard are endless.

Featured Feature: Build Stories Your Way

Every writer and every storyteller has their own unique approach to the process of storytelling – and VocaTales storyboards can accommodate any creative process you can imagine.

On every VocaTales board, you have the freedom to draw, take notes, embed media, arrange sections/subsections, and visualize the elements of craft that bring your story to life, in whatever combination suits your personal creative style.

Fiction piece? Create character arcs, detail plotlines, chart intersecting timelines/perspectives, and more.

Nonfiction? Build a research plan, compare/contrast sources, construct charts and diagrams, organize notes and quotations. And more.

Worldbuilding? Map sprawling worlds, illustrate individual locations, brainstorm with moodboards, delve into characters and histories with unique building blocks for every object, event, and faction… and more.

Essays? Map arguments, track main ideas/concepts, analyze counterpoints, visualize historical contexts – and more!

Graphic novels and scriptwriting? Create or upload sketches, outline dramatic structures, arrange scene-layouts, merge text with images. And – no surprise here – more!

Poetry? Short stories? Personal narratives? Journalism? Visualize themes, motifs, and symbolism, draw relationship webs, chart meter, rhyme, and rhythm – and, as always, more, more, more.

Whatever your preferred genre or creative approach, VocaTales’ storyboards can make your process more efficient, more effective, and more fun. With complete flexibility and customizable toolsets designed to meet any creative challenge, the uses for our boards are only limited by your own imagination – and that means the possibilities are endless.

Featured Feature: Visualize Elements of Craft

Storybuilding and Storycraft together form the backbone of the creative process – as a unit, they’re concerned with combining and refining all the individual elements that work together to create an effective story. What are these elements? Anything and everything that transforms your imagination into a written work that can be shared with others – characters, events, themes, ideas, motifs, symbols; elements of style like voice and tone, literary devices like irony, foreshadowing, and diction… the list goes on.

Surprisingly few of these elements are concrete objects that can be “pointed-out” at a glance in a piece of writing; even a story element as specific as a single character is something much broader than just a name in a sentence – a character is a personality, a culture, a symbol, a series of conversations and actions, conflicts and progressions. Each and every story element is, in fact, a collection of ideas and information. And with dozens of different elements going into every story, it’s a whole lot of information for a single writer to keep track of!

That’s why VocaTales provides customizable building blocks that can be used on any storyboard – these multi-purpose nodes can be used to easily store and reference all the information and resources you want to remember when employing important story elements – images, links, notes, and ideas that give each element its special role in your story. You can use building blocks for brainstorming, worldbuilding, analysis, feedback, and planning – however you choose to build your boards, building blocks allow you to easily visualize the aspects of a story that usually remain invisible, so you can approach the creative process with greater clarity, depth, and confidence. Just drag blocks onto your board, fill them with whatever you imagine, and find them instantly in your project library using personalized keyword tags.

The most important aspects of a story are usually invisible, but VocaTales’ visual building blocks bring the unseen elements of your writing into focus. And with your surroundings clearer, it’s easier to enjoy the journey ahead – when you build and craft your stories with precision, what once seemed like an obstacle on the road from idea to final draft will instantly feel more like an adventure.

Featured Feature: Feedback at Your Fingertips

Storycraft is traditionally the most challenging stage of the writing process – and not just because it can be difficult to receive critical feedback on your work from an audience of peers, experts, and readers – we invest a huge amount of effort in our work, and it’s far from easy (but undeniably necessary) to hear that it could still use some improvement. But there are also plenty of practical challenges to contend with in the cycle of review, feedback, and editing: How can you request the specific kinds of feedback you’re looking for? What’s the best way to review and organize that feedback? And what kind of method should you use for implementing the insights gained from reviewers and editors as efficiently and effectively as possible?

VocaTales’ storyboards, building blocks, and dedicated storycraft tools have the answers – they work in harmony to make the review and editing process at the heart of storycraft as intuitive as possible for any writer.

Requesting Feedback

Inline comments will always be useful, but they’re old news – who enjoys scrolling through a 10,000 word document, scanning for highlights, and then trying to contextualize and respond to every comment? No reviewer we’ve ever met, and it’s not easy for writers to keep track of everything, either. Thanks to VocaTales’ storyboards, you can request critiques on specific sections of your document directly on any board, creating two levels of feedback that ensure highly targeted responses from reviewers. First add your more general, high-level feedback requests as comments to the relevant chapter/scene on your storyboard, and then highlight specific areas of interest with inline comments in the linked section of your document – this will help reviewers cater their responses to individual portions of your writing without losing sight of the exact kind of feedback you’re looking for, and make it easier for you to ask for that feedback more precisely.

And if you want to drill down even further on a single character, event, or idea? Initiate a discussion on an individual building block so you and your reviewers can easily reference the pertinent information, and see where the element is at work in the linked sections of your document.

Reviewing/Organizing Feedback

Anyone who’s participated in an in-person writing workshop has undertaken the messy task of sorting through a dozen-plus annotated copies of their manuscript, struggling to compare and cross-reference reviewer commentary. Even online, it’s difficult to sort through an assortment of comments to find points of agreement and controversy. With VocaTales board-t0-document feedback system, you can compare and contrast the general impressions of different reviewers on comment threads attached to chapters, scenes, and building blocks, and then move to the more targeted feedback on inline comment threads in your document.

Implementing Feedback

With all your feedback organized by chapters, scenes, and building blocks, implementing good insights and making edits to your document is simple – review high-level feedback on your boards, automatically navigate to the correct section of your document by clicking the relevant node, and then edit accordingly. And if you need to reference board comments as you edit, just click the “comment-list” tab in the top-right corner to view and search through all reviewer comments on your project.

The review and editing process is challenging enough already – VocaTales document/storyboard systems irons out the additional kinks of requesting, organizing, and implementing feedback so you can focus on refining your writing and creating stories you’re proud of, without any of the extra hassle.