Scrivener - Where Have You Been All My Life?

A screen shot of Scrivener with my novel in it. Colours! Pictures! A cork board!

Meanwhile, meaning while I'm not delaying writing the novel by writing articles and papers about writing the novel, I have been working on the novel with a new piece of software.

Many people know Scrivener, I feel like a latecomer. I found it via a tweet and I am so grateful. I thought I was pretty clever by having ditched Word years ago (a bloated overblown piece of software if ever there was one) in favour of the excellent and efficient Nisus Writer Express. But I still had a folder filled with sub-folders, stuffed to the gills with versions and scraps and research and pictures and all kinds of guff that one day will all magically transform themselves into a novel. The thing gave me nightmares. Once, I accidentally started editing an older version of the novel.

Within five minutes of downloading the trial version of Scrivener, I knew I was going to buy it. It felt like the answer to every gripe I've had about my lack of ability to marshall the sheer volume of data that writing a novel generates.

Scrivener allows non-linear scatterbrains like me to organise everything I've ever done into a labelled, colour-coded order. I can add photographs (very useful for me, given that I've now created two art projects of photographs based on this novel-in-progress), I can make notes in the text, add comments, auto-create chapter synopses, and I can see them on a cork-board layout, and move them around on there, too. You can split the viewing screen into two (horizontally or vertically), so you can compare, drafts, or have the last chapter up to refer to when you start the next. The programme interacts with the web beautifully too. Just drag a link into it, and the website displays inside the programme, next to your page.

It might just be the best software in the world ever…


http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php