Scrivener

over the last few days Scrivener has kept popping up in my life, like a reoccurring dream, I'm starting to wonder if its some kind of giant cosmic hint.

Has any body installed it? do you use it? how are you are you getting on with it? pros and cons? or anything you want to tell me about it.

I case you haven't heard of it, its a word processing app especially for novel writing (although can be used for other sorts of writing) with lots of special built in tools for organising and planning apparently.

Thanks in advance

Tried it, liked yWrite better.

I started using it about a year ago, in the middle of a Camp NaNo.
It was pretty easy to jump in, though there's a bit of a learning curve. Pretty shallow, though. I like how flexible you can be with it - easy to move scenes around, get a good overview of what you've written both in a "cards/post it notes on a board" way and outline-kind of way. You can keep track of characters, scenes, outlines, notes, research. I still learn new features, but you don't need to be an expert to use easily. There's a couple of easy and useful "How To" guides for it available on Kindle, but you don't need any of them - for anything that's not intuitive, their internal Help guide is very good. It will also export your finished product in a variety of formats, ready or nearly ready for e-publishing. Though I've not tested that, I have exported to a Kindle-ready and iBooks ready format and the output looked good to me.

While I bought it full price, $40 (in a period when I was feeling flush), at the end of Camp NaNo, Scrivener - who's a sponsor - gave those who finished their goal a 50% discount. So if you wish to wait, they may do that again this time (I haven't entered and finished since then, so I don't know). But I think it's particularly useful for organizing and writing novels and long pieces (though I routinely use it for stories and to organize my poems as well).

So I highly recommend it.

PS I checked my NaNo email - 20% discount through November with a NaNo coupon.

I downloaded it about a year ago, with thirty hours of use free before I have to decide buy or not. I assume that if I do get to thirty hours it will lock up until I buy.

I spent a couple of hours on the tutorial. I seemed to me that it would be a great tool for working on longer stories, or if you were really serious about writing. But I'm just an amateur that does it for fun. And I've only been able to finish one poor story since my Halloween submission last year.

So I've never finished the tutorial, There were just so darned many features that I don't think I could remember much less use. So I continue to use Libre Office, and I don't imagine I am using half of what it could do.

49greg said:

So I continue to use Libre Office, and I don't imagine I am using half of what it could do.

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How many people do? Most features of most programs seem wasted on the average user. I'd be surprised if my use of any program covered more than 10% of what it can do.

Nice plug for the FOSS software dude, Why anyone would buy MS Office when they can get Libre Office for free escapes me.

Messier82 said:

How many people do? Most features of most programs seem wasted on the average user. I'd be surprised if my use of any program covered more than 10% of what it can do.

Nice plug for the FOSS software dude, Why anyone would buy MS Office when they can get Libre Office for free escapes me.

Click to expand...

I think Libre is easier to use than MS Word as well. I like it so much that I've donated a few bucks the last couple of times I got newer versions.

A long while back, I checked out Scrivener. Nice program but somewhat too complex.

I tried yWriter. About the same as above but free as i remember.

In the end I went back to my original way of doing long stories and novels. I have a folder with the story in it. also in the folder I have a short concise character sheet on the main characters. I also have a story arc sheet that is subject to change from minute to minute as I go from point A to point B. The points don't change much but how i get there does. My characters take on lives of their own. And last but not least is the research page. Cut and paste, arrange as you see fit.

This is all done in Word 2000.

It's worked for 9 novels in mainstream and three novels/novellas here on lit. Of course, your mileages may vary.

Messier82 said:

How many people do? Most features of most programs seem wasted on the average user. I'd be surprised if my use of any program covered more than 10% of what it can do.

Nice plug for the FOSS software dude, Why anyone would buy MS Office when they can get Libre Office for free escapes me.

Click to expand...

Because my license was purchased because the company I work for sponsored its employees so they could get a full blown copy of office 2007 for $20.00 for home use.

My 1997 license I got because the company was upgrading to 2003 and they were just tossing the 1997's in the trash bin. I retrieved one and registered it without a problem. It was a copy the company had never used.

And even though I have Office, for my writing I hardly use more than 5% of its capabilities. That's why for big projects I use yWrite, that's anything over 20,000 words or a series.

I also have Libre Office and several other cool writing tools, that I hardly use, but have just in case I run into a need for them.

Messier82 said:

How many people do? Most features of most programs seem wasted on the average user. I'd be surprised if my use of any program covered more than 10% of what it can do.

Nice plug for the FOSS software dude, Why anyone would buy MS Office when they can get Libre Office for free escapes me.

Click to expand...

I used to use OpenOffice/NeoOffice, but I bought Word after I started doing editing work for a publishing house; "mostly compatible" wasn't close enough. Even the Office for Mac vs PC Office inconsistencies are annoying.

At least I got to write it off on my taxes.

I had imagined publishing houses would want Text (*.txt) or Rough Text Format (*.rtf). Last time I submitted a piece for paper-based publication I was still a Windows & Office user so it wasn't an issue.

I was somewhat pleased to discover recently that the UK Government has made Open Document Format its default. However, I suspect this decision may have been engineered by big-business puppet-masters (who mentioned Google?) who were known to be 'having talks' at Downing Street in recent times.

Messier82 said:

I had imagined publishing houses would want Text (*.txt) or Rough Text Format (*.rtf). Last time I submitted a piece for paper-based publication I was still a Windows & Office user so it wasn't an issue.

I was somewhat pleased to discover recently that the UK Government has made Open Document Format its default. However, I suspect this decision may have been engineered by big-business puppet-masters (who mentioned Google?) who were known to be 'having talks' at Downing Street in recent times.

Click to expand...

Everything I do in Mainstream is Word .doc and nothing else.

Thanks for the feedback everyone, I'm just about to give NaNo a shot for the first time, and i'm planning to write a futuristic dystopian young adult novel which will (hopefully be the first part of a trilogy) I've never felt the need for organisational assistance before, its not that i'm organised I'm incredibly disorganised but my memory is very good, so its always compensated enough for my flakiness. but with the world building and the series thing going on i'm worried I might need a helping hand.

Anyway, while I was googling for reviews I came across this, 56% on scrivener for the next 3 days I guess its legit?
https://store.boingboing.net/sales/scrivener-2?rid=2321509

Word has an outline view that's worth trying out, if you have word already. I wouldn't go buy word for or because of that feature, but it's helpful for organizing. Like every fancy feature (collaborative authoring for example), it's not nearly as good as the hype, but still helpful if you learn to use it.

Messier82 said:

I had imagined publishing houses would want Text (*.txt) or Rough Text Format (*.rtf). Last time I submitted a piece for paper-based publication I was still a Windows & Office user so it wasn't an issue.

Click to expand...

I think some publishers will happily accept .txt/.rtf as a format for submission, depending on the content. But I'd be surprised if anybody was turning that into print books without first importing it to something with more scope for layout/formatting/etc.

In my case, the material I edit has a lot of technical content (diagrams, mathematical expressions etc) and txt/RTF aren't good for those - not that there aren't plenty of ways to screw it up monumentally in Word. Depending on the work and where it's up to they'll send me either a .doc, .docx, or PDF. Or dead-tree, but we seem to have stopped that.

LaTeX is also popular in academic circles for technical content, but the learning curve is a bit steeper than Word at the start.

Oh, btw.... RTF = RICH text format. (EDIT: I do realize the rough thing was probably a joke..)

I've used it for all 11 years as a ghost writer. Without it I wouldn't be able to write a whole 50k novel in 1 month. It helps with small projects like blog postings and short stories focused around a specific niche.

It's amazing.

Zeb_Carter said:

Because my license was purchased because the company I work for sponsored its employees so they could get a full blown copy of office 2007 for $20.00 for home use.

My 1997 license I got because the company was upgrading to 2003 and they were just tossing the 1997's in the trash bin. I retrieved one and registered it without a problem. It was a copy the company had never used.

And even though I have Office, for my writing I hardly use more than 5% of its capabilities. That's why for big projects I use yWrite, that's anything over 20,000 words or a series.

I also have Libre Office and several other cool writing tools, that I hardly use, but have just in case I run into a need for them.

Click to expand...

I got a free version of MS Office from work as well. They wanted me to have it so I could work at home as well as at work. I think it's 2007 - I retired soon after and still have the CDs , but once I tried Libre I quit using office, although I can save and open in Word if I want.

49greg said:

I got a free version of MS Office from work as well. They wanted me to have it so I could work at home as well as at work. I think it's 2007 - I retired soon after and still have the CDs , but once I tried Libre I quit using office, although I can save and open in Word if I want.

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I have Libre Office too, just in case, but I can drive MS Office so much better...after all, I've been using Office since Windows 3.1 (1994). The soon after that Office '95 when Windows '95 came out. (1995).

I'm the same with other pieces of software...

I have both Paintshop Pro and Photoshop, but I can drive Paintshop so much better.

I love it. I just went through the tutorial that's included in the program and was up and running. There is are plenty of you tube videos as well.

The only think I don't like is it's not really transportable as it would be if you had a document in word.

It's worth it for managing large projects with multiple scenes with lots of play space to move scenes around and access quickly.

Oh I bought it a few weeks back and its changed my life.

I think for me being able to compartmentalise all the different bits of a story i'm working on, label them according to how far they are from finished and title them so I can easily skip around between them has saved me loads of time and made me feel much more in control of the whole process (I frequently felt overwhelmed before using scrivener).

I was a bit naughty, I didn't finish the tutorial, I got about a third of the way through and put it to one side and jumped in. There are probably loads of ace features I'm not using. I really should get back to it at some point.

I use Scrivener for longer works and greatly enjoy its organization and ease of use.

I tend to do most of my actual writing in Q10, a free bare-bones word processor that only does text, though, and then port it over to Scrivener for organizing and compiling.

Wow! I just write, LOL.

But maybe I should use Scrivener for my fantasy trilogy with spinoff novellas that TXTallTales already told me off about - for having thirty new characters in the first three chapters

NaokoSmith said:

Wow! I just write, LOL.

But maybe I should use Scrivener for my fantasy trilogy with spinoff novellas that TXTallTales already told me off about - for having thirty new characters in the first three chapters

Click to expand...

when I first put the word out and asked people for their opinions of scrivener, quite a few people who'd bought it didn't really got on with it, Maybe its because I don't write in an entirely linear way, but I'm finding it enormously helpful.

without it i spend huge amounts of time looking for bits i want to rewrite for continuity reasons (I'm not uploading my current story in instalments, i'm planning on getting it finished first -i've just gone over 45,000 words). the other thing i used to do was open the word doc of my chapter and just start fiddling around with the beginning every time, or get a few pages in and get distracted and start fiddling there instead. Now I can find the bit I want to work on immediately and crack on with it. before if a chapter i was working on passed the 8,000 word mark I started finding it unyeildy and overwhelming. with scrivener you can split things into chapters and into scenes within chapters.

scrivener is well suited to the way I work, it helps me organise my thoughts and I'm glad i've found it, but not everyone works in the same way I'm sure.