Writing 1st draft in Scrivener or notebook?

Is the link to currently available ones. These are done by Oliver
Here is email address to get on list for webinars . He is very good but fast. I note time of interesting points in lecture then go to points I like and can stop and absorb stuff at my own speed

oliver@literatureandlatte.com

Haven’t tried it so I don’t know for sure. I would expect they would copy over just as free form text: Goodnotes has no concept of “hierarchy” to build an outline around.

I’ve used other tools (not in iPad) that fall under the heading of “mind mapping apps” like The Brain. It does export to a hierarchical structure, which seemed useful.

Goodnotes is, effectively, electronic paper. It has exactly the same understanding of structure that a blank piece of paper does. It is significantly “dumber” than Scapple, much less something like The Brain. Which for my purposes is a good thing. YMMV.

(You can write symbols that Goodnotes will correctly OCR into a bulleted list or Markdown markup. But actually interpreting those symbols is up to other programs.)

what kind of pen do you use. I have a couple of those apps but my pen broke.

When I was (back) in university I used HeadCase, which was a wonderful Mind Mapping program. It was the only thing I used on Windows. It could cope with my fine motor control issues and its use of splines meant that despite my inability to exercise finesse with mouse/pen created very pleasing maps. The program has long since been abandoned by its author, sadly. Even sadder is that the Buzan Organisation’s own current app is not a patch on HeadCase.

Apple Pencil. Paperlike screen protector. Both recently acquired, so I can’t comment on reliability or longevity.

I’m a big believer in experimenting until you find the way that works for you. Everybody’s different, and for no discernable reason. There’s no wrong way to write, as long as it works for you. (And is legal.)

Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo wrote everything on a typewriter, but he had to be naked in a bathtub of water. Emmy-Winning TV writer David Milch lies on the floor and dictates everything to a stenographer. James Patterson, the best-selling author in the world, writes everything longhand in pencil, and has trouble reading his own handwriting.

I’m like @kewms – I have a bag full of tools, and if one way isn’t cutting it, I’ll try something else.

A couple of tools that bear mentioning are Curio for the Mac and Concepts for the iPad.

Curio is like an infinite workroom for your project. In addition to notes and diagrams you create in Curio, you can embed any document in a Curio project. I set up a Curio project for every script I write, and I drop a blank Scrivener file in each, ready to go.

Concepts is a drawing app for the iPad, which I use for mind mapping and frewheeling note-taking. I prefer this app because it has an infinite canvas, and the pen and pencil emulation is quite realistic. If you just use it for brainstorming, the free version works fine.

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If you haven’t already, buy replacement tips for your pencil from Apple. I use my Paperlike so much that I wore away the tip of the pencil until it exposed a metal point. My pal the storyboard artist told me he goes through a pencil tip a month.

Thanks for the warning!

You obviously have a very visual imagination and workflow. I wonder about how these tools import and export. Does Concepts export to Curio? Does Curio export to Scrivener?

For all this stuff I have mostly worked on paper and with index cards of various sizes.

I think about the transition from pictures to words. I have drawn pictures to clarify images, and I believe images are an integral part of ‘envisioning’ the narrative. Jeff Vandermeer talks about a ‘charged image’ being essential toward the ideation of a novel-length narrative.

Yeah, the visual part is very important to my process. I sometimes export a PNG or PDF from Concepts and send to Curio using Dropbox. Often, I use concepts to get through a logjam, and once I get insight, I return to the Mac.

Photos and concept art can trigger a treasure trove of ideas. I often make some kind of a mood board in Curio and then brainstorm with it visible.

From your handle (popcornflix) I assumed you write screenplays among other things. What kind of things do you write?

I’m a pro screenwriter in Los Angeles. I mostly write studio movies, but I’ve done some network TV as well.

Before I got into showbiz, I wrote fiction, too. I’m toying around with writing novels on the side. I have to say that Scrivener is really good for novel writing.

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I found computers a godsend when they finally came along in the 70s and 80s - they allow me to cut-and-paste and save very quickly. So, that is my preference.

However, if I am travelling somewhere on public transport, I often take a pen and a few pieces of paper with me, make notes/do some writing, and enter that into the computer when I get home.

Another advantage for me is that when I finish a writing session I immediately make back ups in four or five different places (two cloud-based services, a HD, and a thumb drive), so if I have already created the file (in Scrivener), all I have to do is copy it to the required back up source.

Having said the above, if write in longhand, in a notebook, using a fountain pen works for you - then do it.

THE ONLY thing I would just suggest if you write in a notebook is that you make back ups of what you have written - photograph your writing on your mobile 'phone, or read what you have written into your 'phone, laptop, or other digital recorder, and then back that up - as soon as possible after you have finished writing. If you do not make a back up (and preferrably 3), then you risk losing ALL of your work if you lose your notebook or if it gets stolen or damaged in some way.

The best of luck.

I use ClearScanner on android.
It saves to multipage PDF, and it aligns, fixes the angle and trims the photographs it takes of your pages.
It even has OCR (although I never used it and don’t know what it is worth).
It has functions to upload to google drive (and some other places) for backup.
Works wonderfully. And it’s free.
I definitely recommend.

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Microsoft Lens provides similar functionality on Android - although it may not be as extensive as ClearScanner.

I use macOS, iPadOS, iOS depending on which device I’m using and grab text out of whatever is on the screen as an OCR. And when I need (very rare) to create PDFs I slice and dice the content using Preview.

Do you mean that you just copy it as text and paste it somewhere? Please clarify.

Personally, there are two reasons for which I prefer to have my pages as a multipage PDF rather than to use OCR:

1- I don’t think I’d get accurate results given the way my longhand writing gets when I’m in a hurry to put down the sentence that is in my head, but that is yet trying to loop over itself and fall into dismemberment.

2- My pages are full of scratch-offs, circled scratch-offs (unscratched so to say), arrows, replacements and margin notes. All of which I want preserved at this stage.