For what it’s worth, here is a brief account of my experience using Scrivener for this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNo, to the initiated). For those who aren’t familiar with it, NaNo is a crazy idea - everyone who takes part undertakes to write a 50,000-word novel between 1st and 30th November. Everyone who achieves that total is counted as a winner. The word count is the sole criterion, nothing whatsoever about quality.
I finished my contribution (50,133 words) late on Saturday evening. It was my first experience of using Scrivener for a substantial piece of writing. Up to then I had only used the program for short writing exercises. I might add that NaNo was my first experience of writing more than a few hundred words of fiction.
I have to say that the program performed superbly. It was rock-stable and did everything I wanted it to. The only blip was when it refused to export my draft once it reached a few thousand words. That turned out to be a bug in the program, which Keith fixed and issued an updated beta on the same night. I couldn’t have asked for more.
I had two slight niggles with Scrivener. One was that it isn’t possible to display the total word count for the entire draft on-screen as I type, excluding annotations. I understand that this would be difficult to achieve in the programming, and I don’t think that would be an issue outside of NaNo, where word count is everything.
Annotations again, I would prefer a system of margin notes (a la Jers Novel Writer, or Word’s comments), keeping the notes well clear of the text, but that’s nit picking. I’m quite happy to settle for the present system. Maybe in version 2 in a year or two’s time?
My only other complaint was with this forum. It’s so interesting that it makes the perfect distraction from writing. Maybe next time I should shut down my newsfeed reader when I’m writing.
I tended to write in the binder, but occasionally would go into full screen mode. It was helpful to set the background fade reasonably low, so that I could still see my lists of character, etc. in the binder. I did find at one stage that inputting text in full screen mode was pitifully slow (on my 1Ghz iBook), but that was to do with other programs I had running at the same time.
I used the binder extensively. I started numbering chapters consecutively but then, as I discovered gaps which needed filling, I went back and inserted new chapters (1.5, 2.5, etc.). Eventually I started a new folder for each of the later chapters, and used a separate document for each scene. About three quarters of the way through, I jumped to the ending, and then worked back from there. That was easy to do in Scrivener, just inserting new chapters/documents as needed. The ‘edit scrivenings’ feature was really helpful in looking at selected parts of the draft.
I also kept lists of characters, places, etc. in the binder. It was useful to be able to refer to them as needed. I put some key information about some of the settings used in the novel into the research section of the binder and that was helpful to refer to also.
As I progressed, I found the corkboard to be useful, mapping out chapters and the major scenes within them. I haven’t yet used the outliner at all. I haven’t yet been able to fathom out any uses, but that may come in the future.
I’m still trying to work out how much information to keep in Scrivener itself. I use DevonThink and Yojimbo for assembling bits of information. I started a DevonThink database for this project and in the future I think I would look to moving key bits of information from DT to Scriv. I appreciate your efforts, Keith, in smoothing that transition.
I feel I’ve been able to give Scrivener a thorough road test, and it performed superbly. I look forward to getting to know the more subtle aspects of the program better, now that I have time to read the tutorial and forthcoming help files.
All in all, a great experience. Thanks for a superb program. I look forward to becoming a regular user. Now if only you could build in a little feature which would improve the quality of what I actually type! 
