I think it’s important to realize, though, that not all writers work that way, especially some of us who do purely creative writing 90% of the time. For those of us in that group who are like me, writing is as much about form as it is content; if the font on the screen isn’t right, if the margins aren’t just right, if the tab stops don’t all line up perfectly, and if the lights in the room aren’t at a certain level and just the right music playing — in short, if the writing environment itself doesn’t “feel” exactly right — then our process is compromised, and it makes creation harder, not easier, when tools and features are either taken away or not present. This make strike some people as unnecessarily anal retentive, and as placing demands on the software that it shouldn’t have to meet.
To give you an example: On the one hand, one little thing that Scrivener does exceptionally well is cater to these types of needs. A good example is the text and paper backgrounds feature, in Preferences. For some projects, I prefer a brown parchment paper with a varnished wood “desk” beneath it; for others, I prefer white construction paper on a background of clouds. Helps me get in the groove, to find the right creative space in which to work, and helps me evoke the creative identity of the project itself; for fantasy, parchment is best; for science-fiction, lightly-inked grid lines on plain white; for school projects, a sheet of college-ruled paper, faded just enough so that the lines don’t obscure the text. This is a great feature of Scrivener’s, and it’s made my creative process that much smoother. (As has the ability to adjust the font face and size of numerous interface elements, from index cards — the metaphor of which is nicely jammed home using actual red and blue lines on the cards — to the Binder.)
For folks like me, going back and forth between different software packages is an unnecessary break in the creative continuum; it severs the technical aspect of writing — which ought to be invisible anyway — from the creative aspect, and invites having to switch between left- and right-brained tasks. Thus, the more in-built technical features that a creative software package can make effortless and seamless — thus blurring the lines between creation and production — the better. We are not all of us technical writers who will gladly eschew aesthetics of process for quick and dirty solutions; it’s odd that Scrivener, being a program that goes out of its way to provide creative writers with exactly the organizational tools they need, is (due to the limitations of Apple’s text system) sadly lacking when it comes to some of the finer points of text manipulation. Don’t get me wrong; I love Scrivener’s way of doing things — it’s why I haven’t switched back to Word or Pages, despite their proficiency in the latter area.
And as someone who HAS repeated three times that “Scrivener is not a WYSIWYG word processor,” and as the current patient of a very good therapist, I can tell you that there is such a thing as “All or nothing thinking,” which this strikes me as a golden example of. No one is asking that Scrivener be the next Microsoft Word, or that it try to compete with Pages in terms of a large-scale feature set, or even in terms of intended audience and user-base, or that it abandon its original mission and try to be all things to all people. Rather, what I said was that Scrivener ought to have a few more tools for dealing with tables and lists. It doesn’t have to have stylesheets, and crazy word art, and live, self-calculating tables, or fancy text boxes with drop shadows. Those are all fun things to fantasize about that will never happen in a million years, because those ARE far afield from Scrivener’s mission. Tables, outlines, and lists aren’t.
And for what it’s worth, I think that everyone here realizes that Keith does not have the resources of Redmond or Cupertino, thanks very much . . . in fact, I believe I acknowledged this fact in my initial post. Which is why I specifically requested that something like this go on the “to do” list (which Keith then replied that it was), and why I specifically referenced the issue of “spare time.” I was prepared to say no more about it after his initial response, especially after being told it wasn’t a high priority (which was a letdown, but one I got over fairly quickly).
But, there’s a certain breed of computer user out there who annoys the you-know-what out of me. They like to talk about how GREAT it is that you can’t do a something in a certain software context, and how AWESOME they think it is that a piece of software has such a narrow or limited feature-scope, and I honestly think they get off on the idea of being these cyber-Ubermenschers who stoically deny themselves ANY and ALL bells and whistles that might — gasp! — distract their fragile attention spans away from their super-efficient workflow. Well, I’m a big kid, thanks, and I can deal with extra buttons on a toolbar or an extra menu option here and there without my entire creative process falling apart. In fact, those bells and whistles are pretty good to have around sometimes. Can I live without them? Of course. But do I prefer to? Of course not But all that is actually neither here nor there. As Keith himself pointed out earlier, Scrivener’s features are not limited (at least not primarily) by the fact that he adheres to some badass, ascetic philosophy of Spartan software design and narrowly-targeted feature-sets . . . that might be a factor, sure, but it’s not the main reason. Rather, it’s because he relies on Apple methods to do the heavy lifting so that he has to do less coding, and because at the end of the day, the man just wants to spend time with his wife and kids, and doesn’t have the resources in terms of time or money to invest too heavily in satisfying what is — admittedly — a fringe of the user community like me. I don’t take issue with that — but I do take issue with worshipping at the altar of efficiency by sacrificing more aesthetic considerations. Scrivener is NOT awesome because of what it is NOT — i.e., a dedicated a word processor. That’s “bass-ackwards” thinking, as my grandmother used to say. Rather, Scrivener is awesome because of what it IS — a powerful, writer-friendly content creation application with a nice set of organizational features, a good deal of customizability, fairly impressive speed, and lots of writer-centric tools, such as text statistics, targets, and synopses, and that employs cool, sensible metaphors such as index cards, and that is excellent in that it abstracts just enough of the task of creation from the task of production and output. Basically, I don’t see the sense in bragging about how few features something has (or how few you think it needs), when in truth, the number of features a program needs is however many it takes to get X job done, and how at the end of the day, the quality of your creative work is what you brag about . . . not the super-efficient process that you used to create it. No one really cares about that part, except you. If being efficient makes you feel like a badass, then by all means, badass away; we still won’t care. Especially since one process is fairly equal to another, so long as — again — it gets the job done. For me, Scrivener fills about 90% of my needs as a writer — and so I naturally don’t want to have to use other software; for me, that’s highly inefficient, and it screws with my creative groove. Your mileage may vary . . . but I see no harm in pointing out the obvious — Apple’s text system is, to quote someone above, “dire.” And even if Keith can’t exactly whip up a solution and pull it out of a hat by tomorrow, we as users can still alert him to the fact that there’s a problem, or a limitation, regardless of how niche our needs might be or how obscure and narrowly-targeted our requests are. They may not get implemented, but they still deserve to be heard and considered, which Keith has thus far done a marvelous job of doing.
—A.H.
They’re a bit limited, they’re not great, but they don’t make me particularly angry, and we haven’t had any serious complaints in this department until now.
