A Windows version has been available for years. I bought my copy of Windows Scrivener in 2014, and it was and still is awesome. What L&L is developing now–it’s in beta–is a Windows product that will have full parity with the Mac product. so at some point this year Windows will become even more awesome.
The suggestions from the folks above are good ones, even the ones that seem to disagree. In the end, everyone learns software differently and everyone has different objectives for their writing, so there is no “one right way” to learn or use Scrivener.
The Manual - The Scrivener manual is so big and intimidating that many people run screaming from it, but in reality it is gentle and helpful and wants to be your friend. L&L spent a lot of time on it. The manual contains answers for most of the product-specific questions you will have, and probably has answers for many of your process-specific questions. (One of the reasons the manual is so big is that it has quite a bit of process guidance.)
I read the thing cover to cover, but that’s just me. What I recommend for normal people is to thoroughly read the table of contents and each of the “In this Section…” overviews located at the start of every section. That will give you a better understanding of the capabilities of the product. Then read the detail in the sections that sound interesting to you. If you do nothing else, read chapter 5 “All About Projects”, particularly the portion on backups.
Backups - You are responsible for your data. L&L built a nice automatic backup system in Scrivener. Learn how it works and be intentional in how you configure it. There are, unfortunately, many threads on these forums started by folks who have lost work because they didn’t take the time to understand and set up their backups. It’s a sad and unnecessary way to learn that lesson, because everything one needs to know to properly backup Scrivener is in the manual.
My backup recommendations
- Back up on project close = yes
- Compress as zip files = yes
- Use date in name = yes
- Only keep n most recent backups" = 25. I think the default is 5. Yes, changing it to 25 will take up more space on one’s hard drive. If one’s hard drive space is more important than one’s writing, maybe one shouldn’t be writing.
- Backup location = Wherever you like, just not in the same folder where you store your projects. Be sure you know where you’re storing your backups, so that when disaster strikes, you don’t have to post here asking “Help! Please tell me where my backups are!”
- Use Time Machine to backup up your Mac. I don’t have a Mac, so I don’t know how to set that up, but it sure sounds like a good thing to do.
In my opinion, Scrivener is like an elephant: best eaten in small chunks. You might want to take on one of those four goals first, and not try to do all of them at once. Perhaps first write the new story in Scrivener. Or put in Scrivener whichever of those works you are currently most focused on. Or, what the heck, go for all of them!
I haven’t imported any existing stuff into Scrivener, so don’t have any suggestions there, except to say that when you copy text from another tool to paste into Scrivener, use Paste & Match Style so that the text takes on Scrivener’s formatting.
There really is no one way of setting up a Scrivener project “properly”. It all depends on what you are trying to do.
For novels, here’s a post with some suggestions on how structure a novel in Scrivener: literatureandlatte.com/foru … 68#p233568
For short stories, I have some really short ones where I’ve put the entire story in one document, but for the longer ones, I will structure it as one scene per document.
Hope some of the above helps you with your learning curve!
Jim
