Editing first (and second and third ...) drafts
If you have a good chunk of story that's gone in several directions, you can plug character and plot ideas into the spreadsheet and see what works together and what doesn't. It can help you identify the inciting incident, the midpoint, whether your Main character's goal is enough to drive them through the story.
It's helped me pin down the Main character's Fatal flaw, realize the guy I thought was the Bad Guy wasn't and figure out who was.
Writing first drafts
As you're writing, making new discoveries about your characters, plug in the new ideas and see how they resonate with what you have. The sooner you can figure out what your Main character wants and how he gets in his own way, the less wandering you'll do.
Planning a first draft
If you're a plotter, it should work quite well. The spreadsheet makes it very easy to play with ideas. Change the Main characters fatal flaw and goal and see it instantly reflected in the log lines, structures, theme and support characters.
If you're a seat-of-the-pants writer, it will seem like telling Jackson Pollock that his paintings need to look like recognizable portraits. How can you know what your character wants before you've written her? And what about the dozen other characters who will drop in and seem just as interesting?
Having pants-ed several NaNoWriMo novels, I know that experience well! And, after NaNo, I also know the feeling that somewhere in those 50,000 words there's a story if I could just find it.
Give planning a try. If it feels alien or you just don't know enough about the characters or what could happen, skip the planning. Come back after you have a good chunk written. Plug stuff in. See if it shows you some things you didn't know about your story or reveals some holes that you know just what to fill with.
Crafting complex characters
Not so good. Not helpful at all, really.
Yes, I know, darn! Creating characters is the fun part of writing. I would have loved to have some kind of app to let me play around with quirks, backgrounds, personalities. Most things I've played with have fallen short because the elements are just too random. (Though the contributors at Seventh Sanctum do provide a wealth of generators that create a wide variety of random.)
But when it comes down to it, I can create characters. What I can't do is structure.
Story Sculptor can help with the character roles that need filled: the Main character and main opposition, their goals and flaws, of course, but also the necessary characters who will poke and prod the Main character in ways he needs to grow and change and do the right thing. Characters who will support, ask the right questions and throw the right obstacles at the Main character.
And it does provide lists of values, personality traits, fears and motivations to choose from. So it's not totally useless for creating richly detailed characters. Just mostly useless.
Finding the Theme
Did your brain just shut down? No, really, theme isn't that awful and not just for the high-brow literary stuff they tried to make you analyze in school. ;-)
Once you figure out your Main character's fatal flaw, the flaw that's kept him from reaching the gusto he knows he deserves, you're halfway to theme. There's a list of Themes and Topics to help you wrap you brain around what a theme is. And there's a chart to poke around and play with that will help you tease it out of your brain -- without shutting it down.
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