About the project

Project Davenport is a cross-platform plotting and planning application, custom-built to meet the creative needs of writers and novelists. It's named after a writing desk popular in the 19th century, prized for its compactness and multitude of handy drawers.

If you're anything like me as a writer, you've tried all sorts of software to help you develop your ideas, and all of it has been sort-of-useful but ultimately frustrating and distracting. I have folders full of spreadsheets, mind-maps, to-do lists and flow-charts, all gathering digital dust. After abandoning them and bludgeoning my way to the final page more or less unaided, I decided there had to be a better way. Something a bit like a flowchart and a bit like a mind-map, but much more than either.

This is that better way.

Space to Think.

The primary function of most software is to communicate ideas, not develop them. The purpose of a flow-chart application is to help you while away a productive-looking Wednesday afternoon creating an attractive slide or PDF, which usually means a cluttered and sluggish interface prioritising visual customisation and precise layout over flexibility and responsiveness. Mind-mapping tools are typically leaner and do help unpack ideas, but scale poorly. Spreadsheets are... fun to colour-in?

Davenport gives you not just an unlimited canvas but unlimited canvases, organised in drawers and linked however you like. Want to break your novel down by chapter? By act and chapter? Want character sheets? Want to turn that scene into its own drawer, so you can document your thought-processes or jot down some great lines? Knock yourself out; no wrong answers. Click anywhere and start typing.

But Davenport drawers are much more than pigeonholes: they allow your ideas to live in more than one conceptual space - a sentence so pretentious I'd delete it if it weren't really important.

Everything to Hand.

When you write something in a spreadsheet or a notebook or a flowchart or on a sticky note, that's where that idea lives. It has one physical location, and can only physically be near so many other things. But an idea can have all sorts of connections and connotations - so where do you put it? Into a scene-by-scene breakdown? On a theme-board? On a mood-line? On a page tracking a relationship? Into a character sheet?

How about all of the above? That way it would always be close at hand, however you wanted to work with it.

Usually that means ten copies of the same thing in ten different places - a disheartening prospect when changes need making, and a recipe for later confusion.

Or was it eleven places?

Davenport has your back. You can push any idea or note into as many canvases as you like, make different connections in each space, and navigate to anywhere that idea lives with a mouse-click. So if you're contemplating a change, you can see at a glance all the threads that change is going to tug on. Oh, and changes propagate automatically, of course.

But that's just the big picture.

Moment to moment, as you're typing, Davenport's always-on internal search engine puts everything you type about at your fingertips, instantly. Any word or phrase can be a trigger. Mention a place - hey look, there's that map you sketched; just drag it onto the canvas to pin it for reference. Mention a character, and there she is.

And speaking of characters...

Time to Change.

Flowcharts and spreadsheets can easily depict a timeline or character arc. But they have no concept of change: they don't appreciate that the different boxes you've filled in represent the same person or situation at various moments in your story.

Davenport is different. It understands that characters and relationships and places can and should evolve. So when you're roughing out a scene and mention a character, what pops up is her as she is at that point in her arc. Reference a place and the map that pops up can show you exactly where your adventurers are at that precise moment.

Frictionless Interface

Features and functionality are worse than useless if they spend more time getting in the way than they do helping. Davenport's interface is intentionally minimalist - I hope you forget it's there at all.

Works as Fast as You Can

Davenport isn't built using productivity app libraries or frameworks. It isn't coded in JavaScript or Python. It's being developed in Unity, an engine widely used in the game industry where 'a long time' is measured in milliseconds, by a programmer who has spent the last thirty-five years wringing performance out of desktop, console and mobile hardware. My tolerance for mouse pointers in the shape of a timepiece is pretty much zero.

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