It can sometimes be helpful to remember that good designers spend as much time perfecting their skills as writers spend perfecting theirs. Just because you can do it yourself in Scrivener, that doesn’t mean you should. The point at which wrestling with Scrivener becomes an exercise in frustration – which will be different for different people – is the point at which one might consider using a different tool, or assigning the work to a different person.
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As well as not trying to learn a sophisticated and wide-ranging software programme using a project which is under deadline pressure. A lot of the frustration was self-inflicted: it’s not fair to blame and badmouth Scrivener for your own shortsightedness. Mastering anything challenging does require the missing ingredient: open-ended, relaxed time. Practicing with dummy text helps too.
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The idea that someone would find Scrivener too difficult to learn and so resort to using InDesign, a far more complex and challenging programme, is hilarious!
As, frankly, is the idea that getting an Adobe subscription is the cheap option in any scenario!
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If you can find a better writing tool, please post the name of it here. I love Scrivener. But mostly because I’ve not found a better writing tool.
My issues with Scrivener have mostly to do with its obsessive redundancy and its inscrutable interface. There are usually 3 ways to accomplish the same thing. There are the same things presented as different. There is so little consistency of attributes and behaviors and their situational application. There is so much inconsistency in hierarchy of structure and tools. It is menu mad. It is contextual poor. The User/Project/Document/ metaphor is loose and confusing. The special project documents (Manuscript, Research, Other) types are poorly distinguished and difficult or impossible for the user to understand or discern. There are so many places where the tools that apply to one view or context are missing or presented differently in other views and contexts. The toolbar and menus are not situationally, contextually aware.
Scrivener’s Metadata is strangely named and awkwardly dealt with. The search tools are again redundant and inscrutably inconsistently distinguished.
The main application settings and project and document settings are inscrutably distinguished and inconsistent. And that is just editing and navigation. When “Compile” is attempted, a whole new world of inscrutability is ladled in.
Again, I want to make it clear that I use Scrivener all day every day, it is my go-to writing tool. I love it! but I hate it too. I can clearly and unequivocally state that I hate it less than I hate Microsoft Word and its clones, I hate scrivener far less than I hate other book writing tools. I don’t and will never love any of Scrivener’s so-called competitors. I definitely don’t want a pared down Scrivener, a Scrivener Lite.
I want all of the tools Scrivener offers, and I want more. I just want them to be better organized, more intuitively offered.
Oh, and I want a Scrivener not slanted towards fantasy and fiction writing. I would most definitely enjoy a Scrivener that offered more page layout options (margin notes, margin illustrations, margin content, and I would like control over illustration and photo and graph and pull quote, and asides placement and text flow around such objects. I want to be able annotate illustrative objects with captions and attributions. I would like to be able to place footnotes (or their equivalent) in the margin and associated directly with main text. When Scrivener users suggest such affordances and conveniences her in the forum, they are consistently scolded, told that Scrivener is not a layout tool. But this goes completely counter to the automation power of Scrivener’s Compile functionality which is nothing if not a layout tool. Margin layout affordances would also make a user’s writing (editing) and navigation process that much more intuitive and effective and efficient. Another of my criticisms has to do with the limited power a user is given over what is and is not displayed while writing. For instance, I would like to be able to toggle the visibility of everything that is editing specific, and everything the current compile settings would output. As example, Scrrivner’s Placeholders are powerful but visually disconcerting and distracting. As I am writing I don not want to see “<$pageGroupParentTitle>” and “<$forename>, <$firstname>”, I want to see what they are to be replaced with. Sure I’d like at times to see under the hood, to see the markup, but that is not the default view I wan’t while writing. In word processors, this is equivalent to the “Show/Hide Invisibles” toggle. No such convenience is available in Scrivener. I can see a simple and obvious and universal preview function (command-key/spacebar) that would present the currently edited text in the currently selected Compile configuration… even if such a preview would be an estimated preview. The whole point of the last 45 years of computation has been WYSIWYG interface and interaction.
Oh, and I want at minimum for a book writing tool to have automated affordances for all of the parts a book is expected to have. Table of Contents, Glossary, Index, Photo and Illustration Attribution and Index, Author Information, Bibliography, etc. I want automated timeline navigation and presentation, I wan’t automated character and place extraction and navigation. I want automated continuity checking to happen in the background and that alerts the writer in real time where continuity errors are made.
For now at least, Scrivener is the best of the best writing environments. As such, it is the best possible starting point for the evolution of ever better versions of Scrivener. And by that I am not referring necessarily or exclusively to the adding upon of yet more features, but also to a yet better use metaphor and yet more intuitive and powerful user experience.
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Blimey, I’d hate to hear your thoughts on an app you don’t “love”!!!
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I basically use Scrivener in the same manner as if I was only using MS Word/Apple Pages/LO Writer: just write stuff WHILE taking advantage of the added-value organizational functions the others lack (the Binder and the Inspector with all its unique Scrivenery stuff) that enables me to Have Everything In Just One Software And Not Spread Out Across Numerous Apps All Running At The Same Time And Taking Up My 8GB Of RAM.
All the more involved and complicated ‘high learning curve’ stuff I learn as I go, when I need them. No stress that way. I’m confused or flummoxed by something? Chances are I’m not the first and it’s been asked here. I find it easier to begin writing my question, relying on Discourse to let me know it’s similar to 452,129 earlier posts. Otherwise I politely ask my question and say thank you when some nice forum person solves my problem.
I love the video tutorials. I’ve watched many just out of curiosity as well as when I needed to find out how to do something. They’re short, to the point, describe the functions very competently, and boggle my brain when I discover something that Scrivener can do that I didn’t know about before. “Oh, my GAWSH!!! This thing can do THAT?!?!?!?” and then I whack my head with both hands in utter astonishment. And many times I didn’t even know I needed that. (The Scrivener function, not the head-whacking.)
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I fear that you are asking the caterpillar how it can coordinate all those legs to walk, and then watching as it discovers to its horror that it cannot. I can use Scrivener, but I have a hard time explaining how it works for me, only that it does.
All levity aside, the value is in the use. Maybe its a lot like how cell phones changed photography. I have several DSLR cameras, but I rarely use them anymore because I have a camera on my phone that’s always in my pocket. It’s like that, the tool at hand vs the better one in the shed. Or to put it another way, ‘when the only tool in your hand is a hammer, it’s amazing how much all your problems start to look like nails.’
I’m of the opinion that the Inscrutability in Scrivener is a by product of it not requiring strict adherence to it’s programmer’s creative method, or any method at all.
I use Scrivener for my most complex projects. There is nothing else that could help me keep them together without the project falling into pieces. (Ok, in Scrivener it is already into separate pieces…).
But I would like the UI was somewhat less crowded, and the visual representation a bit modernized, more or less in the lines of Randall’s message above.
Using it as if it was a traditional wordprocessor instead of a writer’s lab is a big mistake, but it is quite clear since the product’s home page.
Paolo
If this was in reference to me, you misunderstood what I wrote:
It should be obvious from that that I do use it as a ‘writer’s lab.’ I’ve had Scrivener for 4 1/2 years and I’ve gradually expanded my repertoire of “higher end” Scrivener tools. If this wasn’t in reference to me then ignore my reply 
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