Shaxpir 2.0: Unified Content Model

From the beginning, Shaxpir’s most important design goal has been building tools for the actual craft of creative writing. Thinking about fonts or formatting is a distraction when your real job as a writer is word-building, story engineering, and prose craftsmanship.

That’s what Shaxpir is all about.

So when we designed Shaxpir 1.0 two years ago, we spent a long time thinking about the brainstorming process and how to design tools for structured world-building. We included a categorical note-taking system alongside the manuscript editor in every new story project, with support for six different categories of notes, organized into folders:

Using these six categories, you could build your own miniature wikipedia, with a note for each of the elements of your story, and cross-references between those notes representing relationships and symbolism. It’s everything you could possibly want!

scenes took place, and explorations of the themes implied by the narrative. You’d also have pages for important background concepts in the exposition of your story, as well as a catalogue of important physical things (like magic wands, flux capacitors, glowing briefcases, microfilm canisters, and other random trinkets and macguffins). You could cross-reference those notes with each other, or with the chapters in your manuscript that referred to them.

But as Shaxpir 1.0 landed in our beta testing community, we started to hear similar feedback from many of our most dedicated users about how these six categories made the note-taking system difficult to use. The specific requests we got from users included questions like these:

• Can we create our own categories? (e.g., WEAPONS, VEHICLES, MAGIC SYSTEMS, etc).
• Can we subdivide the existing categories into groups.? (e.g., organizing CHARACTERS into families, or grouping PLACES by region)
• Can we change the category of an existing note? (e.g., changing a CONCEPT into a THEME)
• Can we change a NOTE into a CHAPTER, or a CHAPTER into a NOTE?
• Can we just create free-form notes, without having to force them into a list of categories?

In the original design, none of that was possible. You could only create notes within the existing six categories, and once they were created, their categories could not be changed.

So for Shaxpir 2.0, we’ve completely redesigned the content model to support every one of those use cases and give authors the flexibility to organize their story notes however they like.

In this redesigned notebook, we eliminated some of the categories that users found confusing, leaving three default categories in every new story project: CHARACTERS, PLACES, and THEMES. But now we also allow users to add, edit, and delete categories, or divide existing categories into sub-categories:

To add your own new categories, just click the Create Content button and choose New Notebook Folder from the menu. Then give your folder a unique name. The next time you click the Create Content button, the menu will include a category based on the name of the folder you just created, allowing you to easily create notes in that category.

Categories and folders are related concepts, but it’s important to understand the distinction. Categories apply to individual notes, while folders are just used to organize notes within your notebook. In Shaxpir 1.0, categories and folders were essentially the same thing. The list of available folders in a story project was identical to the list of default categories. But in Shaxpir 2.0, we’ve given you independent control over both categories and folders. For example, you could create a note in the CHARACTERS category while organizing it into a folder called VILLAINS or MAGICIANS. The thing that ties categories and folders together is that the Create Content menu suggests a list of categories for your new content, based on the list of folders in your current story.

Finally, if you prefer to avoid categories and folders altogether, you can still use the notebook as a free-form collection of notes. You can still drag-and-drop your notes into the order and hierarchy you prefer, without having to use folders or categories at all:

This overhaul of the note-taking system is one of the big changes we’re most excited about in Shaxpir 2.0, and it shows our dedication to building the kinds of features our community of authors will find most useful, supporting every author’s individual writing process.

You asked for it, and you got it. Welcome to Shaxpir 2.0.