Writing software: Two years with Scrivener

Are you wondering what to get for that writer on your holiday gift list? Get Scrivener from Literature and Latte. Your writer will thank you. Of course, it’s possible that they will find the software so useful that their writing hours will multiply and they will leave you with just scraps of their time as writing overwhelms another life. Software can be fraught with peril.

I last wrote about Scrivener in my 13 April 2018 blog post. I had been using it for two and a half months and was still learning how things worked. Now, nearly two years in, I know the software much better than I did back then, and I like it all the more. In 2018, everything I had in Scrivener I originally wrote in Apple’s Pages word processor. Now I have three complete novels written from scratch in Scrivener. It’s a great writing environment and a major boon to my creativity.

For me, Scrivener’s most useful feature is the “Binder” on the left side of the window. I think of it as an outline of the novel. I write each scene in Scrivener as a separate text file and the Binder organizes these hundreds of files into a simple hierarchical format. A title on each scene identifies it for me. The Binder lets me move things around and I often do. It also gives me the freedom to write non-linearly if that is how my muse is moving me that day. I can jump ahead and write things that come later. I can fill in the outline if I want to plot the novel in advance, or I can just add the scenes as they come if I am “pantsing” it. That freedom, together with easy organization, is a potent combination. 

Another feature I love is the ability to assign Metadata to scenes. I add the date when each scene takes place and in some novels even the part of the day. It is wonderful for keeping track of the timeline and making sure everything works. I also add where the scene happens. I said in my blog post last April that I had even included the snow depth in each scene in my novel Neyuki, since it is important to the plot. I put in keywords that indicate the type of scene, symbolism, characters, etc. Then I can gather the scenes with a particular character or setting or scene type (e.g., dialogue scenes) so I can edit them for consistency. The flexibility is fantastic.

In my April 2018 post, after praising the software, I tempered my review with a significant drawback: “But—getting your work out of Scrivener can be a terrible pain.” I was referring to compiling the scenes into a manuscript, Epub, Mobi (Kindle), or other file format. There is a steep learning curve. It is not simple. But over time I solved my problems one by one and the formatting possibilities are powerful. So after working with the software for almost two years, I no longer feel that outputting from Scrivener is particularly painful.

But—I still do not trust Scrivener’s compiler to get the formatting perfect. For example, in a recent compile where I allowed hyphenation, Scrivener broke the word “wanting” after the “i,” so instead of “want-ing,” it gave me “wanti-ng.” I do not understand how such an error even makes it into a software program. Either someone at Literature and Latte messed up, or their lexicon includes a woeful error, or the user can customize hyphenation points (which would be a useful feature) and I accidentally did this. (I don’t think it was me, but if it was, there is no excuse for software being that easy to mess up.)

There are other little formatting problems. They are few and rarely pop up, but there are just enough that if I end up self-publishing, I will have to use layout software such as Adobe’s InDesign for the final formatting. I wish Scrivener had that capability and I could trust it and skip that final step, but that is a bridge too far.

So I recommend Scrivener as a gift to the writer in your life or yourself. Find a discount and buy it. Do it now. You will enjoy its organizing features, which I believe will unlock greater creativity in you. With a bit of learning, you’ll be able to output files in almost any format. And then, if you’re like me, when you’re done with all the writing and editing and you’re ready to publish, you’ll worry that the formatting isn’t perfect and you’ll take your output into something from Adobe.