Day 193: Writing with Scrivener
Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash
Since my 4-Hour Focus Rule has me elbow-deep in my book draft, I’m trying to move from the purely-researching phase to the reseraching-and-drafting phase. (Unlike some writers, I never seem to be completely “done” with research and ready to begin writing; at some point I have to cut myself off and start writing, with the understanding that I’ll fill in the gaps that appear as I go along.)
I have a concept for all of Part One — about 1/4 of the full manuscript — that I want to draft this spring. I have an old draft that I can pull from, but I want to start over, mostly, with a different tone. Part One has multiple chapters — I’m not sure yet how many — that all center around southern Ohio in the 1870s and 1880s, but that also strive to relate that place and time to bigger issues in American politics and culture.
Enter Scrivener
All these different threads were starting to get tangled in my head. I remembered a colleague once telling me she loved Scrivener, and showed me how she liked to use it for writing law review articles.
I tend to be very much a late adopter of technological tools, so I didn’t jump on the Scrivener bandwagon back then. This week, though, I decided to test it out as I outline Part One of my manuscript.
Some pros so far:
Scrivener has many short, simple, and accessible tutorials (narrated by the founder with a charming British accent)
I love that they give you a 30-day trial that’s actually 30 days of use, not 30 calendar days
The Binder outline helps me think in terms of separate scenes in my story
Building my Part One outline in the Binder and moving sections around has already come in handy
It’s smart so I don’t have to be: it lets me move folders and sections around pretty intuitively
The jury’s still out, though. Mostly, I think it’s just a lack of emotional comfort with the interface. Writing has a certain alchemy; mix up one element and you could end up with a completely different metal. By switching to Editor Only mode the draft doesn’t look too different from my Word document, except all the little dotted lines that reflect my outlines sections. Also, I have far too much memory-guzzling research collected already to move much of it into Scrivener, so I’m still toggling back and forth to my OneDrive for sources.
I’ll keep experimenting (I have 28 days left in my free trial anyway). Writers, what do you think?