Our goal at Novel Goggles is to help writers to craft better stories, whatever their writing style.

Story planning and structure, integrated with the living manuscript.

The Origins of Novel Goggles

Novel Goggles is developed by Exceptional Invention (Pty Limited), which was founded by me, Lionel Basson.

The desire to create Novel Goggles was kindled while I was struggling to regain control of a story manuscript that had gotten away from me. As the story grew in scope, the struggle of maintaining consistency and evaluating what story elements were missing or needed revision became increasingly detrimental to my enjoyment of writing. As I tried to resolve the problems with my own manuscript, I started reading more about story structure and the different ways that writers try to resolve these issues. As I learned more about the fundamentals of story-telling, story structure and how other writers go about managing their stories, the seeds of Novel Goggles were planted.

Initially, Novel Goggles was envisioned as a tool to help evaluate and refactor an existing story. As development progressed and users gave feedback, it became clear that providing the maximum benefit would require tighter integration between story planning and analaysis, and the process of writing itself. This has resulted in the Novel Goggles available to you today, which includes a word processor with tight integration to the story planning and structure elements.

What does the future hold?

While I am proud of what I have developed thus far, the journey does not end here. I am constantly striving to improve the existing features of Novel Goggles and add exciting new ones. I hope that 2024 will be a year of growth for the Novel Goggles community and for my company: Exceptional Invention. With a growing community, I hope to find a growing group of users who are excited to try out my new ideas and provide feedback on what they think can be better. By growing Exceptional Invention I will have more resources to apply to the creation of new features, the development of new technologies to support my more adventurous ideas, better testing, and a more modern and responsive look.

If Novel Goggles sounds exciting to you in its current form or you're excited about where you think I'll take it in the future, you can support me by subscribing. I encourage my adventurous users to subscribe to the Pioneer subscription tier when it is available for new subscribers, you can read more about the Pioneer program here.