Guest blogger Mindy Klasky is the author of six fantasy novels, including the award-winning, best-selling The Glasswrights’ Apprentice and numerous short stories. Her latest novel, Sorcery and the Single Girl, is the second book in a series about a love-struck D.C. librarian who discovers she’s a witch. Ten percent of proceeds from the sale of Sorcery and the Single Girl and Girl’s Guide to Witchcraft, will benefit First Book.

I recently acquired a new computer, a shiny new iMac. Now that I’m a member of the Apple Conspiracy, I am finally able to use an Apple-only writing program, called Scrivener. My writing process is changing, from the ground up.

Scrivener is not precisely a word processor. Rather, it is a text formatting tool. It is a research organization tool. It is a thought processing tool. It is a writer/librarian’s dream.

Scrivener provides several different “views”. I can type on a screen, setting down words, much as I do in Word, WordPerfect, or the other word processors I’ve played with over the years. Scrivener can keep track of separate chapters, merging them when I command, monitoring how long my sentences and paragraphs and chapters have become.

But Scrivener’s other views provide glimpses at greater magic. There’s a corkboard, where I can jot down ideas on brightly colored “index cards”, moving them around until I determine the proper flow to a character’s development arc. There’s a section where I can link research, including URLs to websites, or PDF files, or a variety of other data that I have gathered along the way to creating my witch who specializes in magic based on crystals, herbs, and spells.

Scrivener frees me from thinking about my story in a linear fashion. It lets my thoughts flow in new ways, in creative directions. It’s like a giant “cut” and “paste” tool, letting me structure my novels in, er, novel ways.

Scrivener reminds me of the storytelling I began when I was a child. During sleep-overs, my best friend and I would tell each other stories, drawing heavily on our favorite books. We would put ourselves into Harriet the Spy, write our own characters into the Chronicles of Narnia. We would huddle beneath our covers in the magic of a darkened bedroom and tell each other stories, never hesitating to stop, start again, go back and weave in something that happened earlier in our made-up timeline. We created, without the fear or constraint of linear narration.

I’m loving this trip back to the storytelling freedom of my childhood, and I can only hope that Scrivener will continue to give my stories the extra boost of magic that I loved in those new-found, new-told tales.

Did you tell stories when you were a kid? What favorite books did you work your way into, creating your own structured narrative?