So, I decided to try Scrivener. I didn’t really have an urgent reason for doing this. It was sort of a combination of feeling like there might be something I was missing that could help me in my goal, and putting hope in hype.
I downloaded a free trial version on both a Mac and a PC. The Windows edition of Scrivener is relatively recent and is basically at the 1.x level in the software maturity cycle, though it seems to be pretty solid, TBH. The Mac edition is at the 2.x level, and that’s the one I wanted anyway. But I thought it might be nice to be able to send the files back and forth (see below).
The free trial actually lasts a lot longer than the 30 days it is supposed to. This may be a bug in the trial time reckoning algorithm or it may be intentional, but it seems like it really gives you 30 days of usage rather than 30 days of realtime from first run. I spent most of a whole day running through the extremely long tutorial and going through about half a book on Scrivener that I borrowed from the Amazon ebook lending library thingy.
It’s a pretty feature-rich program. Most of these features are centered around the premise that it is better to chop up your novel (or other document) into lots of little pieces, such as scenes, descriptive passages, character intros, and all the other bits that a novel consists of. The idea is that you can then move these things around, and view them in outline and onscreen index card modes.
Some people seem to really like this. Just a few days ago, an old friend happened to suggest I use Scrivener, not knowing I already was, and I’d never have imagined she’d even know about it, but she’s been using it for her dissertation. She apparently really liked being able to move chunks around in this fashion.
I, myself, apparently do not. I really don’t see the big advantage to chopping everything into pieces and compiling them later, which is what Scrivener is all about. I have no problem with cutting and pasting chunks of text around, personally. I tried to get the Scrivener mindset and haven’t really been able to. Furthermore it is inconvenient and dangerous that instead of a single file that’s easy to copy around, Scrivener stores all these little pieces in a folder structure of lots of little files. They even tell you in their knowledgebase that trying to move your Scrivener project back and forth between machines, say, using Dropbox, is riskier than it would be for normal word processing files and can result in data loss, because of all the files that need to be kept in sync. This is a bummer because I liked the idea of being able to work on my outlining on this Windows machine I am writing on now and, of course, writing on the Mac laptop I mentioned before. Now I’m scared to do it, certainly not more than once in a while, while taking great care to make sure I don’t lose anything.
I’m not putting down The Scrivener Way. I don’t have anything bad to say about the product other than that I don’t like the multifile storage thing. By the way, storing data in a folder structure of files is common for some other types of software like music recording studio apps, although in that case it’s hundreds of megabytes of high-resolution audio data spread across a bunch of files instead of just a few hundred pages of text.
But I just don’t get what the big deal is with the whole assembly-of-chunks idea. I can see that it could be nice for either a totally disorganized person who needs the structure, or an obsessively organized person who enjoys it; and who wants to start from an outline, or go back and forth a lot from outline to writing, or who moves around scenes or other pieces, a lot more often than I do. Everyone does these things. The question is, how much focus do you really want to put on outlining and organization vs. going on instinct for as far as it will take you? And the answer is well known to differ massively from writer to writer.
I will add here that my friend with the dissertation has a fundamentally different problem from a novelist, or at least me. In nonfiction you have a lot more flexibility as to what order to put information. She had a lot of points that could be placed anywhere, and she really did need to move things around a lot. In fiction, or at least my fiction, for the most part it seems pretty obvious what happens in what order. Subplots for different characters need to be interspersed and there’s some flexibility there, but other than that I just don’t need to move things around much, especially pieces large enough that I’d want them in separate files.
Evidently I’m considerably less Type A than I used to be, and I seem to do as little organization as possible, at least so far. Being something of a nervous virgin here, anything that distracts me from writing is a problem. I do know that as I approach the completed first draft stage, I will soon need to start filling in gaps, and making sure my main storyline and various character arcs all fit together right. Scrivener has some nice features for that sort of thing, such as the ability to associate story characters (protagonist/antagonist/etc.) with files and set up saved searches that show you the concatenated text for a given character from start to end with nothing else. This can be done for locations or time periods or any other tagging scheme you need. Clearly this is a cool feature. I just…don’t use it, at least yet.
The thing that finally got me to start using Scrivener is that it is supposed to be able to compile your document in various formats, including manuscript submission (courier 12, ancient style), plus both MOBI (Kindle) and ePub (everything else) ebooks. I am very skeptical about this because it sounds too good to be true—if Scrivener does a good job of this, it is an incredible and almost totally unique capability.
I have not experimented with it much yet, but I’ve tried a few compiles and they seem to work ok, except that you have to provide different versions of front material (title page, acknowledgements, etc. in different formats) if you want them to be output differently (e.g. manuscript format vs. ebook). It seems like they could have built a very basic template system that would make this easier…or maybe I just don’t know the trick. One thing that’s a possible problem is that the Windows and Mac versions have completely different compile options, and I’m talking about hundreds of options. I don’t understand why they didn’t standardize this.
So, on the strength of hope re: the ebook generation feature, I bought Scrivener and started using it. My reasoning was that I can always compile the document and output it back to Pages anytime I want. I mostly find myself just writing whole long chapters and then maybe chopping them up a little in case I want to intersperse storylines (although I could do the same thing perhaps more easily with cut/paste). Once in a while I do move things around. I really haven’t taken to the outlining/index card/compile methodology, at least yet.
Scrivener is cheap. I bought the Mac version out of the Apple Mac App Store so that updates are easy. Unlike Dramatica Pro, you don’t get both the Mac and Windows versions for one price. But you can buy both for less than one cross-platform license of Dramatica Pro. Don’t take this price comparison to mean one is better than the other, since I really never had the chance to learn Dramatica Pro before it became the software equivalent of a bricked smartphone (the OS 10.7 debacle I wrote about before).
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