Scrivener is currently one of the best-known pieces of writing software out there. People who use it tend to love it and go all evangelical about it (as a number of commenters noted two posts ago). It occurred to me while reading all those comments that talking a bit about what it is, what it does, and how different people do and don’t find it useful might be interesting from a process standpoint, as compared to a use-this-tool standpoint.
Let’s start with this: I’ve tried to use Scrivener as my primary word processor, and after two years I gave up. Here is why:
Scrivener was designed, as near as I can tell, for writers who are fiddlers – the folks who think of a few lines of dialog that are just exactly how those two characters would discuss petunias, but who don’t currently have a scene in which the characters could or would talk about petunias. Or they’re in the middle of an action scene and suddenly realize something important about the angsty background of a character who isn’t even present. It’s for the writers who assemble their writing from pieces that move in and out of their drafts as the story changes and they get new and better ideas during the writing process, some of which turn out not to be better. And it’s for the writers who simply can’t stand the possibility that they’ll cut a line, a page, or a paragraph and then, weeks or months later, discover that they want it after all.
Scrivener is not my primary word processor because I don’t work this way. I don’t really like having my manuscript lying around in little pieces, no matter that they can be reassembled at the touch of a button. One of the joys of my first word processor was that I had a whole chapter available all at the same time, rather than five separate pieces of paper. I was delighted when storage capacity got large enough for me to have the whole manuscript available in one file. Scrivener, which has the bits-and-pieces model of writing built right into its interface and processes, is never going to be my first choice for writing.
But.
But I do use Scrivener. I use it when I have a lot of notes and reference materials to organize. I really like being able to have my character notes and plot idea notes and the text of a fairy tale and various pertinent quotations and the text of my query letter and both drafts of the outline from the portion-and-outline, all available in the same place, indexed and easy to find. This turns out to be where I use the bits-and-pieces method: when I’m figuring out the characters, plot, background, backstory, and all the other ancillary material that I come up with as part of my novel-writing process.
I personally don’t fiddle with my drafts in a way that would make Scrivener a useful tool for writing them. I do fiddle with my before, during, and after notes in just that way. It’s possible that it would also be extremely useful as a revisions tool, for somebody, but I don’t think I have the patience to take my first draft to pieces just so I could check them all and then reassemble them.
For the current WIP, I started off in Scrivener. (I confess, at that point I was still trying to make it work for me as my main word processor.) I put in what I had: a log line, two versions of the text of the query letter, and a first crack at expanding the query into a proper submission-ready outline. Then I poked around online, and added several lists of possible character names from various sources. I made a list of roles: Mom, Dad, brother, Head Minion, Second Minion, Castle Steward, Evil Aunt, Wannabe Dark Lord. I copied the list to a different segment and started trying to match up roles with suitable names. I started another segment to capture worldbuilding ideas, and one for plot possibilities. I decided to chuck the existing outline, so I started a new section for the new-and-different outline.
I wrote a third, very messy outline intended for myself rather than for an editor, with lots of parenthetical comments (“Tour of castle? Anniversary photos!”) that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. I opened another section for the five or six characters who by this time had names, and started fleshing out their roles in the story – what their problems are, how they relate to the other characters and/or my plot, and what they think they want (all of which boils down, one way and another, into what all the subplots are and how they cross and interrelate). At that point, I thought Scrivener was great.
Then I started on Chapter One, and things pretty much fell apart. I made three different runs at writing Chapter One via the bits-and-pieces method, and none of them worked. Part of the problem, of course, had nothing to do with the bits and pieces; it had to do with the location I started in and the resulting character reactions. The thing was, writing it in Scrivener all split up into bits and pieces made it harder for me to see what the real problem was. It wasn’t until I switched to a different word processor and had the whole chapter in one place that I could see and fix what was wrong.
I like having all my notes and character lists and throwaway ideas organized, but I don’t want them right there when I’m writing. I don’t mind having them available – currently I keep my manuscript in one file in the manuscript-only word processor, and leave Scrivener open in the taskbar so I can refer to my notes easily if I need to. For some reason, that works for me, but having them all in the same program with my first draft doesn’t. A writer’s mind is a strange and not-altogether-logical place.
For people who do like to fiddle and who do like having their work pre-split-up into easily rearrangeable chunks, or who perhaps find looking at two paragraphs or a scene or a chapter less intimidating than looking at the entirety of their manuscript thus far, or who want all their notes and reference materials right there in the sidebar all the time while they’re writing, Scrivener is just the thing.
For the curious, my current word processor is yWriter. It’s a lot like Scrivener, and I’d really rather be using the plain vanilla word processor that was my workhorse for a good fifteen years, but it doesn’t run under Windows 7. What I like best about yWriter are the statistics, especially the little box in the taskbar at the bottom that tracks wordcount – total, this chapter, and what I’ve done so far today. (Monday was bad; I clocked -47 words on Monday…) Other than that, it has a lot of bells and whistles that I can and do ignore; the main thing is that it feels comfortable and it thinks the way I do, meaning that when I want to do something a little unusual that I know a word processor ought to be able to do but that I’m not quite sure how to do in this word processor, I can almost always find it easily without looking at the documentation. MSWord thinks like an alien – in MSWord, it takes me at least ten or twelve tries to find anything, even after I’ve looked at the documentation. Scrivener is somewhere in the middle; I’ve done enough with it to be pretty sure that I could make it work for me, but it would take a while and some adjusting. yWriter works for me right now.
As Alicia said, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (OK, she said it a lot more elegantly than that.)
Thank you! Thank you so much. I’d been fretting about whether I should give Scrivner a try, since so many writers seem to find it helpful. I didn’t want to, but thought maybe I should. That right there, the juxtaposition of don’t-want-to and should, might have given me a clue! But your analysis has abruptly clarified my thoughts. I am not a fiddler. And my process (so far) is fairly linear. I think I will keep my current modus operandi and simply fine tune it a bit. I can think of one bit of fine tuning right now that’s very simple to do and should improve my comfort level significantly.
I’m glad to hear this, too. I’ve been trying out Scrivener for the first time, and although I do have all those notes and things — I think I much prefer them in paper form spread all over my desk. Even if it means I have to go find where in my morning writing journal I wrote that paragraph about petunias (handwritten!) or finally figured out the character motivation, interspersed with the ideas for a smallholding I was also thinking about.
I don’t like having my story in multiple files. There. And I don’t feel much interest in learning all the functions so they can replace my trusty pen-and-notebook — or at least not right now. Maybe if I go travelling with just my laptop I’ll work on those functions … I can see them being useful for a story binder type of reference. Though again I kind of want a physical binder instead of a virtual one. I don’t find electronic files as idea-sparking.
I much prefer working on paper too. For my most recent WIP I wrote the first draft in a notebook, then typed it into MS Word and printed it out for my first-readers to look over. I did revisions in pencil on the typed printout, crossing things out and inserting bits in the margins or on Post-it notes (or sheets of loose-leaf notebook paper for the longer sections). I ended up with a whole bunch of little pieces of paper tucked into the front of the manila folder the printout was in, things like names of minor characters, a calendar showing what happened on which day, lists of things to add in the revisions, etc.
I do use Windows Notepad (basically just a blank screen to type on) for brainstorming/rambling when I’m stuck on something; for some reason the change of process helps shake things loose in my brain.
This post is super helpful for me right now. I’ve been considering using Scrivener lately. I’ve been feeling a need to organize all my thoughts better. But I don’t exactly work in bits and pieces. I’ll have to look into yWriter too. Thank you!
This is just fascinating.
For a while I was feeling like a Luddite, because I switch between MSWord and the free text editor loaded on all laptops. I do a lot of fiddling with the story, but that is all in my head. To parahprase Mark Twain, “I finish the story before I start writing it” so my process is very linear. And none of my prose is so golden that I must save it forever and ever. The most I’ll do is note down things like names and genealogies in a paper notebook on an as-needed basis. (I also have a manual learning bias, so pen and paper are my default for making things stick in my head.)
Depending on where/how long I’ll be traveling, I either take my lap top or my netbook to write on. Or I write at work over my lunch hour. All three machines have different versions of MSWord – or no MS Word at all in the case of the netbook. So I always save my WIP as a .rtf file on a thumb drive. I didn’t trust The Cloud even before celebrity photos got hacked. Plus, I often write where there is no internet access at all. (Not because I find the internet distracting, but because I love going to certain places that incidentally don’t have internet access.)
Have to say, I’m a Scrivener fan. When I write, I gush onto the page and Scrivener doesn’t get into the way for me. But I’m also very analytic, and I find the support that Scrivener provides for research, organization, meta-information, etc., is unmatched by other products I’ve looked at (don’t know yWriter).
I build my worlds in my head, and document that “offstage”. Once that’s sufficiently solid, then I can write in those settings with those characters and their backstories. These are separate activities for me.
At the moment, in fact, I’m working on a story bible for a new series, and using Scrivener/Scapple/Aeon Timeline to organize it (Scrivener for the writing). If you’re not already using Scrivener, this may be too technical for you, but if you’re an engineer-type you may find this useful: http://hollowlands.com/2014/09/creating-a-book-series-bible-using-scrivener-scapple-and-aeon-timeline/
I use a web-app with database that I coded myself to track character names, physical details such as eye color, important dates (with custom calendars for each world as needed), places (I can add a new place simply by clicking on a map, and tah-dah!), my glossaries, related images and other stuff like that. Also to track progress toward project completion, and my to-write queue.
(I’ve begun adapting my code for multiple users, so that my kids can use it too.)
But for actual writing, basic text editing and a wordcount is all I want.
I’m using BBEdit right now. Its the same text editor that I use for web development.
I don’t need its bells and whistles either, but at least they are useful when I am doing coding, and in the meantime I just ignore them.
I did try Scrivener once. We weren’t a good match.
Interesting. I don’t see Scrivener as a fiddly-bits program but rather as an organizer. In my WIPs, I like to have a Cast of Characters (appearance, traits, pertinent background info), maps, references, a glossary of alien words and phrases, inspiring illustrations, and sometimes even an outline (though that usually gets abandoned by the third chapter when the characters go screaming off in their own directions). It is a joy of efficiency to have everything in a single Project rather than a dozen different files in a folder, or —far worse— everything in a single file that you have to scroll through forever to find what you want.
At the risk of sounding evangelical, Scrivener is a broad and powerful piece of software with a variety of features that can be daunting on first approach, but you don’t have to learn/use it all at once. I don’t yet use a tenth of its features, and it has still proven invaluable. Even if you use it only for text entry, it’s cheaper than most bare-bones word processors out there.
One man’s meat is another man’s poison and all that. I do want my character lists, plot notes, setting specific jargon, etc. to be in a bunch of different files, and can’t stand a program that wants to borg them all into a single Project.
What I’d want is a program that lets me create and automagically update an index to those files, that lets me tag each file in the index with a comment so that I don’t have to open the file to remember what’s in it, that lets me open those files from within the index with the native program for the file, that lets me mess with those files outside the index program without the program getting indigestion, and that lets me search those files as a group.
I’m experimenting with an Excel spreadsheet that should let me do most of these things. But it will take a tricky bit of macro programming to get the “automagically update” part working, and a search feature will not be possible to impliment.
automagically
What a great word! Did you mean to type “automatically”, or was this on purpose? (I kind of hope it’s the latter…)
It’s an old piece of hacker jargon. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/automagically.html
Neat!
If the characters and the glossaries and the maps are stored inside the story project, then what happens when you want to use some of those same characters and glossary terms and places in some other story?
The way I see it, that information belongs to the world, not to the story. I want it stored somewhere that is easily accessible to me no matter which story I am working on.
Just export those parts you want to a template and start a new scrivener file based on that template.
Er… isn’t that just a fancy way of copying it into the next project file?
I don’t want as many different copies of my data as I have books written in that world. I would consider that the opposite of well organized.
Well, I came away from this post with only one impression. The author really doesn’t understand Scrivener at all. If one wants to write a novel in one place, just create one page and write it all right there. There’s absolutely no reason one has to use all or even .1% of the features. Gee, Just close Binder and inspector and you have a blank page you can write forever on. Just because you can use a cork board doesn’t mean you have to. It’s as if the author felt compelled to use every feature that’s available. One can make Scrivener as simple to as complex as imaginable or anywhere inbetween. I don’t get it. Anyone who knows anything about Scrivener at all would know that.
First of all this article is fantastic and thank you.
Scrivener is a great writing tool for any author to have on their computer. I use it for everything. I also use MS Word for my writing just because I love it.
In reading all the comments here, I notice that no one has really touched on the subject that with Scrivener you make it what you want it to be in regards to your writing style. I know most writers, myself included, like things simple. With Scrivener there is a learning curve. The learning curve is really about what you want to do with it. The makers of Scrivener just gives you multiple options to help you achieve success.
For writers who don’t have Scrivener and are on the fence about it. I say go and get the free trial, which you can try for 30 days of actual use, not 30 days period. Nanowrimo is coming up in November and they even provide a free template for you to use.
Trying something new is always scary. Once you realize all the ways Scrivener can really help you, I think you will love it.
I tried Scrivner, and i just couldn’t wrap my head around it.
I tend to keep all my notes, outlines, and characters in one Word document and my draft in another. It helps me compartmentalize better actually, and I like having everything in one spot. Oh, a new character was introduced in the outline? I can scroll up and there’s everything I need to know about him. Oh, I have a particular event that needs to happen in a scene? Great, it’s outlined and noted in the same document.
Writing tools will not do you writing for you. I guess I don’t see the point in using a fancy word processor when a basic one will do just fine.
Yes. I’m not a fiddler, either, and when the Scrivenerphiles go on and on about how you can rearrange stuff in your manuscript, my first reaction is “huh? *why*, for goshsake, would you want to do *that*???” I can’t just move a scene from one spot to another — it would ruin the character arc [wry g]. But then I’m a very linear writer.
I don’t have any problem with Word, but then I know how to do what I need to know how to do, and have for years (I’m still using pre-ribbon Word, which they’ll pry from my cold, dead fingers — hey, it still works on my Windows 8 machine, so there’s plenty of time). At the beginning of a project, I set up a folder, usually entitled New Thing since I won’t have a title yet at that stage, and then subfolders — Plot, Characterization, Conversations (where I chat with either my characters or my muse when I’m plotting or get stuck), Rough Draft, Research, Bits (where those pieces I can’t bear to delete altogether go). Then as I go along and get closer to publication (I’m self-published), 1st revision chapters, 2nd revision chapters, and so on to final manuscript, Critiques, Graphics, Marketing, POD docs, E docs, etc.
All neat and organized, with no Scrivener. I tried *so* hard to like Scrivener, but it just goofed the heck out of the one ms. I tried to work with it on. My productivity went down like a bucket to the bottom of the well (and then the rope broke). So I’m back with the way I do things, and everything’s fine again.
I am, however, beginning to think it’s fiction writing-specific software in general that’s the enemy, not Scrivener in particular, because Aeon Timeline might as well be in Swahili, for all the use it was, too. And it would have been *so* cool.
my first reaction is “huh? *why*, for goshsake, would you want to do *that*???”
Same here. I mean, I can grasp that one might have to do it on rare occasions (our hostess described just such a thing a while back), but the idea of doing it so often that one would extoll the virtues of a program just for that is completely alien to me.
I have had to sit back and figure out the order of a group of scenes, but that happens before they’re written; my brain won’t let it go enough to just write them first even if I wanted to. And besides, each scene builds on the previous ones, in theme and pacing and word choice even if not in actual blow-by-blow events.
Yes, it’s the same for me. My most recently finished WIP required (unusually for me) inserting a bunch of scenes that I realized were necessary only after the first draft was done. I did it, because I could feel it was right. But, hoo boy! I hope I don’t have to do that very often. I *still* don’t have a sense of the whole project as a whole. It feels very disjointed in my mind. My first reader has just reported that she likes the story a lot. I didn’t get the sense that *she* found it any other than smooth – still need to get details from her; I’ve only received a preliminary report. So that’s good. But I strongly prefer a more linear process of writing!
I *still* don’t have a sense of the whole project as a whole. It feels very disjointed in my mind.
Oh, I recognize that feeling! Sooo frustrating, when you know you’re capable of holding the whole picture in your head but the new pieces just won’t slot into place mentally, even if they’re fine on the page.
My new WIP (which is fighting me every step, after insisting it was ready to be written, stupid thing) is feeling that way right from the start. Which is very disconcerting. It’s like writing blindfolded.
*why*, for goshsake, would you want to do *that*???
Three words:
Multi-viewpoint narratives. When you write intersecting storylines, you might find yourself writing one viewpoint for some time because you’re very much in the flow, and then stop to see that you didn’t say anything about Auntie Edna for three chapters, so you have three short scenes with her and the dog and they need to go _somewhere_, but now the reader sees the mansion long before the characters in the other storyline do, so you need to move the bulk of the description, and-
Or it’s the other way round and you feel that your book is too choppy and would work better if you combined two or three scenes of each viewpoint into a chapter…
So that’s one case where even a linear writer might find themselves moving things around a lot.
And that’s not talking about non-fiction or anthologies where one might change the order of things frequently.
That kind of pacing seems to be something I do intuitively — my back-brain just knows when it’s time to switch to another thread (and will stop me dead until I do it) — but granted, I mostly write single-viewpoint. Now you’ve got me curious to try a multi-viewpoint story just to see if I can still successfully wing it with the pacing!
Its interesting to hear other writer’s take on *what* software to use. I’ve been curious about what others use for a long time now.
I will admit, that I’m one of those people who can’t seem to use a specific ‘organizer’ program. Just. . .the way I work does not seem that messy in the long run. (You know, to have notes all over the place.) Although, perhaps it should be. I might get more ideas down if I scribbled the thoughts I had somewhere. But even for a fresh project all of these programs seem to demand too much of me and not give me a smooth enough place to just *write*.
The one I ended up liking best was Liquid Story Binder (www.blackobelisksoftware.com) because it was the most fluid program I found that kept up with my needs – although it offered more than I actually needed or wanted. But I did end up getting it, installing it, storing a few things in it. . .then not using it at all. Hah!
BUT – I fully agree with everyone, that you want your stuff all in one place, not scattered around your computer, and not in a billion different files that are named vaguely and you can’t ever remember what is where.
Ironically – I have ended up simply using MS OneNote (comes with Office). It allows me to keep my ‘notes’ in one tab – naming it whatever I like, or creating whatever template suits me – and my writing in another. I can make separate pages for each chapter, or sub-pages for scenes that come to mind, but I’m not actually ‘there yet.’ (yes, I’m one of those people who can write my story out of order – but then you have to stitch bits together and that can be a pill. I really need to learn to stop doing that. lol) I can pretty much add whatever I need – without getting stuck with someone else’s idea of how things should be assembled, and its not as heavy as Word, though things can be moved over to Word if necessary.
I *could* use Word. Like another poster here, I’ve used it for years, but I did find it awkward for ‘out of order’ scenes, and ‘other’ notes. OneNote gave me the opportunity to keep it all together in one file – yet still be able to put it together in Word later, if I wanted to. 🙂 Or anywhere else, for that matter.
Just a thought for those who find themselves in my position of not *really* finding any of the writing software quite suits. 😉
I have to weigh in on the data for the novel VS. data for the series thing. My natural story length is a multi-book series. I can and have done short stories and stand alone novels. When editors keep telling me to “add more______” my stories tend to go undergo mitosis to fit in all the stuff they want to know about.
While I can do my essential writing with just a simple text editor, I have a folder architecture to keep track of my files of character sheets, encyclopedic reference documents, saved research and etc. So having all of the pieces for one story in one file is counterproductive.
I am something of a fiddler as described; it’s not the primary process by which I make words, but I do often get snippets ahead of where I’m working and jot them down for later use. Yet the merits of Scrivener still escape me. I think it may be one of those things where people look at the way I do something and cry “but that’s so much more work!”, and I look at the way they call “easier” and cry, “but that’s so much more work!”
I have the file for the chapter I’m currently working on, and a file for the bits-I’m-not-ready-for-yet. If I come up with the petunias dialog, I pop that bits file open, type it in, then close it and get back to what I’m supposed to be doing. When I finally get to somewhere that petunias would be relevant, I pop back into the bits file, search on “petunias”, and copy the relevant bit into the current chapter. (And for bits I have to cut or significantly change, there’s a file named “NOT_ch#”, from which they can be resurrected or left to molder forever as appropriate.) I don’t see how this is significantly more difficult than clicking through various tabs or sections or whatever they’re called in Scrivener.
The one thing I kind of wish some software could do for me is to psychically know when I’m coming up on the place where the petunias would fit, and pop up with something like, “Hey, that bit about petunias you wrote six months ago would go great here if you just did [this]!” (Usually I remember on my own, but once in a while I don’t find the orphaned bit until too late, and have to either try to wedge it in after the fact or give up on it.) But I don’t think Scrivener (or anything else) is going to do that, is it?
The whole “all in one file” argument baffles me a little; I mean, somewhere in its deep structure you know Scrivener has to be storing all those different bits in different files, it’s just hiding that from the user. I don’t like software that hides stuff from me, or treats file-and-directory structure like some mystical thing that User Was Not Meant To Know.
I can see where the research-organizing part might be useful to folks who take a lot of notes and things and do a lot of pre-writing development. Me, I keep the research mostly in my head, with at most some notes about where I found certain things in case I need to refresh my memory. The only flaw in this is that once I’m done using it, my brain core-dumps the research. I was an expert on the city of Zurich for six months, but I couldn’t prove it now. 😉
Good software should inspire, should make your fingers itch to use it and play with it and try something new. If it leaves you going ‘meh’ then it might still be a useful tool (Excel does not make my heart sing), but if you loathe it, step away.
Even if it’s the best tool on the planet, if you hate it, you won’t be productive. That matters very little when you do mechanical work (like your taxes), but it matters a lot when you’re doing something creative like writing.
(This is why I can’t use Scrivener. I don’t like it. Storyist, which is fairly similar, had a different effect on me – I downloaded it, and after five minutes I wanted to buy it because I could see so many ways in which it would make my life easier; if the interface ever changed (cough), I might reconsider my enthusiasm.)
It’s actually quite easy to import a document and separate it in scrivener to different chapters, scenes or whatever partitions you have, if you want to use scrivener for revisions. The import function can be told to look for a pattern (default is “##” i think) and separate at those points. No work at all.
I’m rather mystified at the complaint about bits and pieces. If you want to see it all together, just switch to the composite view.
“If you want to see it all together, just switch to the composite view.”
Why would we want to cut a story up just so we can use a composite view to see it put back together again?
You already cut it up when you create separate files for each chapter or scene, do you not? No one is saying cut things up smaller than you’d like it to be. You act like the software demands you behave in a certain way, when it doesn’t. As if someone is telling you to keep each paragraph in ten thousand separate bits.
If each scene is labelled or color-coded based on things you are interested in comparing, like every time you switch POV or switch plot threads, or switch settings, you can see that at a glance without opening up the individual sections (“scrivenings”). If that’s not valuable to you, great. A lot of other useful things it can do too. Its just the complaints here are too vague to even get if there are based on substantial things, or having the wrong assumptions about how to use it.
Pat described how she uses Scrivener to organize her notes. She says she doesn’t use it to actually write, because she wants to see a whole chapter in one place, but doesn’t say what’s stopping her in Scrivener from writing a whole chapter in one place. Nothing about Scrivener requires that. You can write an entire novel in one scrivening. If you impose a limitation on yourself and blame the software, yes I’m going to find that mystifying.
If you go to the doctor and complain your elbow hurts when you smash it with a hammer, the doctor will say well stop smashing it with a hammer!
“You already cut it up when you create separate files for each chapter or scene, do you not?”
No. I have the entire story in one file.
Whoops, didn’t mean to click reply yet.
“You act like the software demands you behave in a certain way, when it doesn’t.”
I can pound in nails with a screwdriver too, but why would I want to?
If I’m going to leave all my writing in one scrivening, then what is the benefit of using Scrivener?
This is a good discussion – informative and thought-provoking. As a writer in search of better software, I came across the Bad Wolf website and, after a free trial of both PageFour and SmartEdit, decided to buy both programs, and at very moderate prices, too. There is even a free version, though it is somewhat limited, as you might expect.
PageFour is an uncluttered word processor aimed at creative writers. It is not suitable for academic work involving tables and graphs and the like. It has some very good features which are explained in a video demo, but you don’t have to use any of them if you prefer not to.
PageFour is for the PC market. As far as I know there is no Mac version. There are now several reviews available online and the software is generally well respected. I hasten to add here that I am in no way connected with the company.
I don’t think you will be wasting your time if you decide to take a look at what Bad Wolf has to offer. So, don’t be afraid. It won’t bite.
Good luck with your writing.