Few things suck as bad as when God hates you. A Celine Dion cover version of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ would be pretty bad, I suppose, but I’m talking about real hate here. I’m talking about giving a person a gift for storytelling and then giving that same person an eleven-year-old girl for a muse, spoiled beyond measure and late to every party. When God gives you an eleven-year-old girl for a muse, kill yourself. Pick up that revolver and thumb-cock it, put it to your temple…close your eyes and grit your teeth.
She knows I need her, and she knows that she doesn’t need me, and God, isn’t that the apotheosis of a codependent relationship?
So here I sit, more monkey than man. I got her favorite playlist on repeat and the lighting in the room is just so. The phone is off the hook and the telephone pole has been chopped down outside. I’m waiting on her, and that’s just the way she likes it. God help me if I’m tweaking the interface of one writing application or the settings of another when she arrives. She’ll be gone as quick as she came, a whisper of silk, and I’ll never even know she was there until a week or more has passed and I’m wondering what I ever did to upset her.
So the software I write with has got to stay out of the way. It’s got to simultaneously have every function I need, and it has to stay out of the way. I can’t be constantly playing with it. I can’t be distracted with it when the little b*#!@ shows up. I have to be writing.
And I’ve used them all. Everything from Google Docs to Word to Liquid Story Binder to Page Four…all of them. It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet, only instead of food it’s words, and instead of words it’s tweaking the interface or changing a setting or cramming the screen with windows full of outlines and mind maps and pictures of characters and their collective biographies from DNA all the way up to what they had for breakfast that morning. Then I look at the clock and I see that three hours have passed, and then I look at the screen and it looks like the Heads Up Display of a billion-dollar bomber making a run on a munitions factory. I look at the chair where my eleven-year-old muse sometimes sits and there’s a note on the seat that says, “Eat hot murder, you stupid-face jackass!”
Thank God I keep the bullets for this thing in another room.
It’s during one of these sessions when I’m browsing the internet that I read a review for Scrivener. I go to their web site. I see index cards on a cork board. I see outlines that can be shuffled around and the scenes you’ve written are shuffled with them. I see a full-screen mode that looks exactly like you are writing on the pages of a trade paperback and they are pages that have no concept of page breaks or formatting until you’re ready to compile the manuscript for the requirements of a given publishing house. I see the software do something I’ve never experienced before. I see it get the hell out of my way. I see it disappear, like a good book does when you’re reading it.
And then I hear a voice over my shoulder, “Ooh, neat!” and it’s that eleven-year-old, kiss-my-back-cheeks ghost, and she’s staring at the screen, something she never does—she prefers to show up and have me read what I was working on before she arrived, and then she likes to roll around on the floor and laugh at me for fifteen minutes or so.
“Where the hell were you three hours ago?” I asked.
“Stephanie Meyer’s house. She’s working on a new series of books. Twilight from the perspective of an amoeba on a fruit bat’s sex organ in the Forks woods.”
“I share a muse with Stephanie Meyer?!” I’m suddenly not feeling well.
“Yeah,” she says, reaching for my mouse and starting up one of the tutorials on Scrivener’s website. “Her and Dan Brown.”
I clutch my chest, take a series of deep breaths. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“You need to get this,” she says pointing at the screen, ignoring me.
“It’s Mac only,” I said, panting, trying to catch my breath.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It won’t run on my computer. You need a Mac, and I’m a die hard PC guy.”
“Does it matter?” she asks.
“Macs are for idiots,” I said.
She looks at me.
So I un-box my new Macbook Pro and fire it up. In twenty minutes I’ve decided that if I never see another Windows machine in my life that’ll be alright by me. I purchase and download Scrivener, skipping the trial because financially speaking, we’re past the point where I can back out (In for a penny, in for a pound), and we’re talking about forty dollars here. Hell, I blow through that on my lunch break at my local strip…mall. Yeah, strip mall.
I import my manuscript and start exploring all of the features. I begin breaking my chapters up into scenes (something I’ve never thought to do before—yeah, I’m a PC guy, what did you expect?), and within an hour I’m kicking words and taking scenes. I am everything you ever heard of, Emperor and peasant, Scuttering bug and conqueror of worlds. I am a writer again, by God.
In the moments where I’m not writing, I’m recording video notes about scenes and chucking them into the research folder along with images accumulated during research and websites frequently visited…excerpts from Questia, Wikipedia…everything. I scour Scrivener’s forums and come across a post from the creators about how they are sorry but they might have to charge for a 2.0 update, and I’m completely flummoxed.
With software, it’s usually always overpriced (way overpriced) and buggy and serves more as foil than assistant, and in those rare and wonderful occasions when you come across a company that charges what amounts to a tank of gas for a product as well-produced as Scrivener, it serves as bracing for your view of humanity. I don’t know what the upper limit is for what I would have been prepared to pay for Scrivener, but it’s far more than what they charge, 2.0 upgrade fee and all.
Finally, writing without manacles! Finally, all things serve the story! Finally, the chains fall away, the computer screen fades, the curtains draw open and the character’s skin becomes pink with the flow of blood. The writer starts a sentence and the protagonist finishes it. The words begin to sprinkle on the page, then rain, every cold drop perfumed with the ozone bouquet of lightnings-to-come. The fish surface to see what insects the rain may have washed into the water. The story switches gears, and it’s another kind of feeding frenzy.
It isn’t often that you get a taste of caviar for a pittance, and when that happens it’s a moment of living wealthy, where money wasn’t an object. Those moments are like a miracle.
Scrivener is another.
