A lot of people think about writing a novel. It sounds like a marvellously fun idea, until you actually sit down at your monitor and start typing away. Or rather, staring away. The first problem any would-be author faces is the immediate enormity of the task ahead: just where on Earth do you begin? Do you invent some clever characters, concentrate on sketching out the overall plot, or just begin typing and see what happens (the monkey-typewriter theory, as it's otherwise known)!

It's with this initial organisational brainstorming that NewNovelist aims to help. When you first run the program, a Story Wizard pops up asking you to describe your story in one sentence and pick from various categories that represent its theme (romance, adventure, crime-revenge and so on). The idea here is to focus your mind on the real meat of your tale, and to explore the fabric of the plot and what ideas and conflicts lie within it.

NewNovelist then switches to its main menu, which consists of two central sub-menus with many branches. The first deals with creating your world and the second concentrates on the story itself. The world-building process prompts you with a series of questions about your hero's environment (what's the climate, what does it smell like?) and other considerations, such as who the antagonists are and what these characters are like.

Some of the detail these questions go into seems irrelevant. What makes a bit-part antagonist's sidekick laugh, or cry, smacks of struggling to pin things down too much in the planning. However, you can always just answer whatever points you feel are necessary and leave the rest.

The story creation aspect arbitrarily divides your tale into twelve steps that are shared by many stories in one form or another. If you're familiar with writing courses and techniques, then you might have come across this "Jarvis method" approach before. It postulates a rough structure whereby the hero moves from his stable and normal life into a series of challenges and problems, then hits rock bottom, before confronting his antagonist and winning through in the end.

This seems overly arbitrary at first glance, but as the program takes pains to point out, this is meant as a guideline which you can improvise across. For complete novices to the craft, however, it will probably help them marshal their ideas, and some good advice is offered in the notes that accompany each step.

What's slightly disappointing is the lacklustre and bland presentation - the menus all look very basic, the way the help pages pop up is a little unwieldy, and the font for user notes is on the small side, with no way to alter it (none that we could find, anyway).

Several extras have been bundled on the disc alongside the main NewNovelist program. There's a short and mildly interesting extract from a book ("Wannabe a Writer?"), along with a resource centre. The latter contains a bank of links to various writing-related Web sites, including author communities, writing theory books you can purchase online, competitions and so forth. There's some very useful material here.

This is a reasonable aid to planning your novel writing, with some useful extras bundled with it, although the presentation could use some polish.