Now joining Team Scrivener: Me!

[annathepiper]

I’ve been super stalled on my writing a lot these last few months–perhaps a combination of mental weariness (albeit a good weariness, the kind you get from having a technically challenging job) from my day job, and a bit of needing to rest up from getting the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy finished off. But this has been going on long enough that I’ve finally decided I need to do something about that. And what I decided to do about it is investigate a potential new way to shoot new life into my writing’s workflow.

A lot of authors I know swear by Scrivener, a program intended to help you better organize your writing. You can write stuff in it and do basic word processing, but that’s less of the point. The program’s a lot more oriented towards letting you organize not only your drafts of your writing, but also accompanying notes and research materials.

I pulled down the trial version on Friday night and spent some time this weekend going through the entire tutorial that comes with it. Which, I gotta say, was splendidly written and gives a great overview of the program and its capabilities. Speaking as someone whose day job is indeed technically challenging, I very much appreciate a well-written tutorial.

After I did that, I started actually trying to do some work in the program. I built a new project from scratch, pulling in the already-written words for the still-unnamed Warder universe story about psychic Elizabeth trying to help Ross discover who murdered his Warder sister.

I’ve gone ahead and paid for the program to activate it, and will be using it as my primary means of writing a draft, moving forward. Still to practice: using it to export into useful formats, like HTML for building ebooks, and PDF for saving archive copies of drafts, and Word docs for anything I need to send to an editor.

What I really, really like about the program so far:

• The aforementioned tutorial. If you’re at all interested in checking out this program, I highly recommend doing the tutorial, just to get a broad overview of its capabilities.
• It’s super-helpful having the notes I’d written for the story immediately accessible in the sidebar, along with the individual scenes for the story itself.
• The dialog box for showing your project target word counts is very helpful and motivating, if you’re trying to hit a daily word count. Progress bar for the win!

I hear rumors there’s an iPad build on the way, and I daresay I’ll be buying that–because having access to Scrivener projects via Dropbox on my iPad would ALSO be super-helpful.

But in the meantime, if you’re not already a Scrivener user and you think you might want to check it out, it lives over here. If you ARE a Scrivener user, what things do you like about it? Let me know in the comments!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Comments

[vatine]

Scrivener is actually the reason why I decided to get a Mac. Not so much for "the workflowy bits" but for "can flawlessly generate Standard Manuscript Formatted Files" (me, and word processors, seriously NOT a good match, given a choice I write in LaTeX, because it's easy and I can use a text manipulation program where all the shortcuts I need have been burned into my spine for decades). On the whole, it works fine for me (in so far as it lets me get text into files, while mostly staying out of my way). I've yet to try any of the (handy-looking, but as of yet not needed) more advanced feature (shuffling scenes about, the plotting cards, ...)

I miss exactly one thing in Scrivener, symlinks between assets in projects (specifically, the "characters" resource(s)). I guess it would be possible to chuck N shorts set in the same world into the same project, but that way lies madness. The other alternative would be to keep those notes outside Scrivener. But that is not using handy resources I should be able to use.

[mmegaera]

Good luck with it. It's not at all compatible with my writing style, so far as I can tell.

I found the tutorial all but useless. Mostly, I suspect, because I kept coming to a grinding halt when it said, look, you can do this! And my response was, why on earth would I *want* to do that? For instance, moving chapters about. My chapters build one upon the other, and if I tried to move even one out of sequence, everything would fall apart. There were at least a dozen other "wow, look, you can do this"s that I had the exact same reaction to, alas.

Anyway, I know a lot of writers who think it's the Second Coming, but all I can do is shake my head sadly, I'm afraid.

I did so want it to be wonderful, though.

[vatine]

I can vaguely see the appeal of shuffling chapters around. I once had a book where I realised about half-way through that I had an idea for "a later chapter", with a bridge to it, yet to be determined. Then I realised, when I was towards the end, that I needed a couple of new introductory chapters (so my "in media res" start got pushed to chapter 3 and a new "in media res" beginning was written). Now, I was writing in LaTeX, using one file per chapter, and a main document simply referencing those chapters, so it was super-trivial to concentrate on the chapter at hand, rather than have to shuffle large swathes of text around.

I don't think it's a feature I would use often, but having it available when it makes sense is kinda nice.

[mmegaera]

Like I said, I'm sure it's helpful for others, but what you just described made my muse's brain want to explode [wry g].