Has anyone converted a half-complete book to Scrivener from yWriter before and be happy to share their experience? I’m doing NaNoWriMo at the moment and picked up yWriter but its export capability is very limited. I’ll be downloading the trial version of Scrivener to test it out, but before I contemplate anything this month I’d need to know if I can easily pull all my prior work into Scrivener without losing all the detail.
I’m assuming yWriter has some way of producing a final draft in some form, a single file that can be loaded into a word processor? That might be the easiest way to do things, even if it sounds counter productive, because Scrivener is so good at splitting a single file up into pieces and organising it out into an outline. Because Scrivener and yWriter approach structure in a different fashion, it might even be beneficial to step back to a linear document and analyse the document from Scrivener’s point of view. What might take longer to do procedurally, could end up saving you a lot of time and making the whole writing process easier for you, since you won’t end up with a constrictive structure based on what you started with.
On the other hand, as for pick-up speed with Scrivener: I’d say it’s quite possible to just pick up the program and starting writing in it, even in the middle of a hectic timeline like the one NaNo presents. At its most basic core, it’s is just a text editor with a handy “file browser” on the side. WordPad with a sidebar. 
You could even ignore all of the deep things it does and just type your whole draft into a single document and get away with it. Now I would be inclined to say that as you work in it over the rest of the month, you’ll gradually pick up on how the corkboard works and fits in with the outline, and start finding ways to optimise the way you write, without burdening your word-per-day output. I think that would be a realistic expectation to have—but even if that didn’t happen, you would still be all right just firing up the beta, clicking in the editor, going to full screen, and just writing. There will be time for tutorials and slowly accumulating a knowledge of how Scrivener can accentuate and support your own unique writing style, in good time.
Thanks AmberV, I’ll give it a go tonight and see how it pans out. Thanks for the extremely fast response/solution.
No problem. And hey, if you do have an hour to go through the tutorial, please do—you will learn a lot from it and it will enrich how you use the program. I’ve just done NaNo a few times myself (four in total with three wins), and I know what this week starts to feel like. The initial high has burned off and now the reality of reaching a high level of creative output each and every day is starting to burn in the brain fry. Taking an hour to plod through a tutorial might not be on the list.
So very true, taking an hour for anything other than recreation or typing for the entirety of this month didn’t give the tutorial much of a chance, and I was a few thousand words behind when I created the thread so I just continued using yWriter for the rest of NaNo. However, now that I have time I’m converting the whole document over to Scrivener. It is already broken up into chunks so I think the fastest method will be just to re-create the structure I have already got, then copy/paste between the programs. Looks like it’s going to be very easy.
Great! Glad to hear it. Once you get over the basic learning hump of “Oh, so that is what index cards are” and a few other things, Scrivener is pretty easy to use. I take it you’ve finished your novel for this year? If so, congrats.