OK, this is going to be my last post on the subject (for a while, anyway - I can’t promise that I’ll never want to sing the praises of this software again at some point) but I’ve posted a couple of times in the last few days, in someone else’s thread, about how good I think Scrivener is. Now that I’ve been using it for a full week, I wanted to say a little more and start a new thread, just in case there are any prospective buyers out there who are not sure whether Scrivener is for them.
For the last few years I’ve been writing fiction pieces. Never had anything published, although that’s definitely an ambition. Last week I got to the point where I needed to sit back and get some kind of overview of the 30000+ words I’d written in my latest attempt at a story. (I tend not to do a whole lot of outlining up front, but get stuff down on the page and then go back and see what I’ve been up to.)
I’ve used Word and OpenOffice in the past but whenever I used the outlining feature it always felt as though the software was in charge, and I had to fit in with how it wanted to do stuff. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know alternatives existed.
I was looking on YouTube, almost exactly a week ago, for a video that would unlock the mysteries of outlining in OpenOffice when I stumbled across a reference to something called Scrivener.
I’ve been using it for a week now and it’s no exaggeration to say that it’s transformed the way I write. (And I might add, I’m not given to making those sorts of statements lightly.) Now, I’m not suggesting for one moment that I’m writing the next bestseller, my storytelling skills could still do with a lot of work, but the writing, the getting of words out of my head and onto the page, has changed totally. The ability to jump, very quickly, between overview and detail, has given me a feeling of ten times more control of the work and made me far more creative/productive than before.
I guess Scrivener has revealed to me just how restrictive traditional word processors are. That’s a lesson I’m really grateful to have learned.
And having spent some time today learning about a lot of the compile options it’s clear that I can produce my novel with almost no need for an additional word processor except for some minor, minor tweaks which OpenOffice will happily handle for me.
Bottom line - I’m enjoying writing ten times more than I was a week ago (and I was enjoying it a lot already).
If anyone out there is wondering if this program might help them, just get downloading that free trial and prepare to be blown away.
Many Thanks to those who developed Scrivener.