![]() ![]() I’ve been writing chapters towards a novel for a few months now, but they are not in any proper chronological order on my computer as Word just organises them alphabetically. I recently discovered Scrivener when a fellow novelist told me about it and was quite skeptical too. And I’ve written numerous big magazine features with it. I’ve just finished the first draft on my third novel with Scrivener. Solent – still not read any Cowper Powys. I never even found out the answer – when I hit the button for the results, it crashed my browser. It’s true! I once went online to check the spelling of a military rank, and spent the next hour doing a quiz designed to tell me whether I should join the army, and if so, in what role. How easy it is to start googling and Wiki-ing in the name of ‘research’ for a review when really the only person I’m fooling, and whose time I’m wasting, is myself. “all of those additional formatting features in Word are little more than distractions and time-wasters”ĭamn right! That, and of course the curse that anyone writing anything now on their computer, be it books or blog reviews, has instant access to the internet, the greatest thief of time ever. Got a piece on windy lewis coming out in march. ![]() Any chance you might get your paws on some john cowper powys (like to see what you think of him)? fraid im stuck with office 2003 b.c…….much congrats on website. As always when writing on a computer, make sure you make regular backups.Ħ Comments on “Scrivener Review: software for writers” Version 2.0, with new features, will be available at some point this year, with a reduced upgrade fee. Scrivener (download) is available with a month’s free trial, followed by a $39.95 license fee if you decide to keep using it. Now that I’ve had a play with it, I’m certainly tempted to use Scrivener for a future project. But, if you have a Mac, I do suggest giving the free trial version a try. The choice of writing tools and methods is a deeply personal one, and so I’d never give a flat recommendation for a writing product. ![]() ![]() There’s an excellent tutorial that takes maybe twenty minutes to introduce you to the features, and once that’s done, there’s no reason why you should dedicate your time to anything but your work. Playing around with the program, I really did feel like I was using a tool, rather than a distraction. “Quickly” and “easily” are really the keywords here. Scrivener provides a variety of ways to link this research content to your draft, allowing you to access the information you need quickly and easily. pdfs, images, web archives, and other useful information about your project. The ‘Research’ folder is a scrapbook in which you can keep text files. (Once you’ve finished your novel, or whatever you’ve been writing, Scrivener allows you to stitch all the parts together and export it as a Word document, so that you can tweak the margins and formatting and get started on your submissions.) The former is your manuscript, and consists of a series of documents, allowing you to divide your work into separate chapters, scenes, or sections, each with its own synopsis and supporting information – as much or as little as you like. The project as a whole is divided into two sections: Draft & Research. Scrivener gives you what you need, and gives it to you in as simple a way as possible there’s even a full screen mode to allow you to focus more fully on the prose. Users accustomed to the feature-rich environment of Word might hesitate at the idea of “basic” word processing, but this is really all that a fiction writer needs-all of those additional formatting features in Word are little more than distractions and time-wasters. Scrivener, which is available only for Mac OS X, is a tool for writers that combines basic word processing features with a system for organising notes, research, and additional project information. As is so often the case when I overcome one of my many prejudices, I’m glad I did. So, when I read on the BBC Website that Neil Cross does most of his writing on a piece of specialist software, I was a little sceptical. Writers need to be do these things for themselves if they can’t, they’re very likely going to have deeper problems that a piece of software isn’t going to fix. Software that, for example, allows you to input a number of aspects of your novel- character name, inciting incident, plot twist 2b-and then arrange them into a pre-formatted structure, is a bad thing. While the elaborate formatting conventions of screenplays mean that Final Draft is a useful tool for screenwriters, there’s a large part of me that believes the only things prose writers need are something to write with, something to write on, and a dictionary. As a rule, I’m highly mistrustful of software that targets itself at fiction writers. ![]()
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