Disclaimer: I’m in no way connected with the developer of Scrivener, and I don’t benefit financially from writing about it.

So why promote it?

Because it’s that good. Writing with Scrivener is the one piece of advice I’d give any writer looking to be more productive, experimental and successful. I wrote the first draft of Make a Move in Microsoft Word, which was fine, but Episode 6 came out all wrong and needed a thorough rewrite.  I’d seen Scrivener, and decided to try it out to see if it would make the rewrite easier. I imported my Word doc, sliced the scenes up into separate files, then moved them around to fix the structure, making notes on each scene that needed fixing in more detail. I was impressed with how easy editing was in the application, so I bought a license. As I used it more, the further the application faded into the background, just letting me research, plot, write and edit as I wanted without any intrusive, misjudged design decisions interrupting my flow.

There’s one problem with Scrivener: it’s Mac-only, which means I need to write the following section to clear a couple of things up.

MacTruths

Disclaimer number 2: I like Macs, and I’m writing this on one, but I don’t hate Windows, and only mildly dislike Linux. I installed Windows 7 on my Mac for some gaming, and I like it a lot. This part isn’t about why you should switch to Mac, it’s about the realities of switching to Mac for Scrivener.

Apple computers are expensive. If you don’t have the best part of a grand (sterling) to spend on a computer, you’re not going to be buying a new Mac. But this is the buy-in price, not the total cost of ownership (TCO), and that’s what matters to me. If you buy a £500 Windows laptop, after four years it will be completely outdated and be worth nothing on the second-hand market. If you buy a base-spec Macbook (just over £800 at time of writing) after four years it will be worth around £200-300 and will sell very easily, so at a push, the TCO of the Mac is £100 more than the Windows laptop, or the same if it’s in great condition and you have a keen buyer. I’m not going to talk about bundled software, pre-installed adware, viruses, build quality or image as, like Scrivener, this is just about writing.

Regardless of TCO, that buy-in price – even on the entry-level machines – is a lot of money, but that second-hand Mac market I mentioned works both ways. You could pick up an Intel-based Macbook for a couple of hundred pounds and it would run Scrivener, as well as Office for Mac, iTunes, an email client and a web browser with speed to spare. Go back further, and as Scrivener still runs on the old PowerPC-based systems (PowerBook/iBook), you can get even more of a bargain. As long as you can install Mac OS 10.4 Tiger on it, it’ll run Scrivener.

Back to the App

So what is it that makes Scrivener so good? In short, it’s everything you need to write.

• Any research/bookmarking applications you use can go, as Scrivener lets you drag almost any digital content into the interface to file away for reference; videos, web pages, text snippets, images, music files – they’re all supported and can be viewed/played right in the application. And it doesn’t matter how much information you drag into the application, as Scrivener uses Mac OS’s Spotlight search to let you find anything within a couple of seconds. Imagine taking your cork board and filing systems with you wherever you go, but actually being able to find things too! This is actually my favourite thing about Scrivener: as all of your research is portable, you’re not tied to that restrictive concept of your “writing space”, so you’re free to write when and where the mood takes you.
• Scrivener lets you outline in a number of ways, but regardless of your method, nothing you write is lost. Add notes to a scene in the inspector, separate from the body text of the scene file, and it can be used later to generate the skeleton of a synopsis, to mark up editing ideas, or to keep a to-do list for that section. And again, this meta-text is searchable.
• Scrivener supports experimentation. If you want to rewrite a scene but don’t know exactly how to do it, just take a snapshot and go for it, knowing you can roll it back if it goes wrong. And if you’re not sure where a scene should sit in the narrative, just switch to the virtual cork board and play around. Drag scenes into whatever order your feel like trying. Go nuts.
• Scrivener doesn’t dictate style or structure in any way. They’re your ideas and words, and Scrivener respects that.
• Scrivener is tidy. Everything is stored in a single database file, so there are no folders full of drafts and ideas to keep track of. Okay, so I still have folders elsewhere, but it’s a habit I’m determined to kill off. That single database file is so easy to backup too – either copy it manually, or zip it up and backup to another location from within the application. I have a local backup running under Time Machine and I also backup a zip every couple of days to an online directory. Scrivener makes it easy to keep my work safe.
• It’s cheap. Not as in rushed or basic, but as in around $40 (at time of writing).

So what else does it do?

• Fullscreen Mode – black out the rest of your desktop, and the application, and just write in plain text without distractions
• Google search within the editor, and Dictionary/Thesaurus and Spelling/Proofreading tools provided by Mac OS – with an internet connection, you have almost all of the research tools you need.
• Cross-file linking – allows you to link to other scenes or research information using a hyperlink, building navigation into your manuscript to aid in cross-checking. All the links are removed when you export the final draft, of course.
• Spotlight search EVERYWHERE – if you want to see every occurrence of a character’s name, or you know someone said something, but not when, you can search for it and see the results almost instantly. There’s no need to step through a document again and again using Find Next.
• Scriptwriting support – full auto-formatting support for scriptwriters. I never thought I’d use it when I bought it, but it was in there for when I found I needed it. Like I said above, Scrivener just replaces the need for other applications.

Of course there are some weaknesses in the application. I understand that Final Draft is more full-featured as a scriptwriting tool, and Scrivener lacks the formatting options of a standalone word-processor such as Microsoft Word or even Apple’s Pages, but this is about writing and story and ideas and pure, uninhibited creativity, not about industry standards and anchored frames. It’s easy to get caught up in the hunt for new software that will make you write better/faster/stronger – I’ve seen it happen and felt the pull of new software demos, but there really is only one 30-day trial I’d recommend, and it’s at www.literatureandlatte.com, along with an active forum and lots of tips, tricks and tutorials.

So, in summary, if you want writing advice, get Scrivener.