I write a lot. Whether articles, book chapters, or just short drabbles I need to get out of my head, I’m almost constantly writing. Unfortunately, much like my work desk, my writing side of my brain tends to be barely organized chaos. At any one time, I have about ten different ideas bouncing around my head demanding to be written. While sometimes these ideas are polite enough to wait their turn to be written, sometimes there are ideas that I know need to be written or I’ll lose them completely. Because of this, it’s not unusual for my notebooks and computer screens to be covered in sticky notes whether real or digital. As you can imagine, the writing folders on my computer tended to get cluttered rather quickly and it got really difficult to organize everything or even find specific documents. I’ve played with a lot of writing programs over the years but it’s very difficult to find one with the freedom to organize things as I need them and specific features I need (looking at you spellcheck). So when I first found Scrivener through their partnership with NaNoWriMo, I was skeptical. I figured it would be something I’d play around with before going back to Google Drive. Four years later, however, I’m still loving it.
One of the things I love most about using Scrivener is the way it not only lets me organize the chaos I call a writing system, but also the way it allows me to easily find my way back to things. Using my book I’ve been writing as an example, at over one hundred thousand words, having it in Google Drive or Microsoft Word alone would be extremely tiresome. If it was all one document, not only would Google Drive take forever to load, but finding a specific section to edit or reference would be extremely difficult. Separating the chapters into different documents did help a little but I quickly ran into the issue of not knowing which chapter specific events happened in, which resulted in multiple documents open at the same time. Overall, a very inconvenient way to work.
With Scrivener, I’m able to set up my story as a notebook, which means while each chapter is separated, there’s no loading time for me to click between them. It also allows me to easily check my word count by just clicking on the story folder rather than having to add up individual Word documents. Scrivener also allows me to create unique tags to each document, letting me track specific characters and plot lines so I can make sure I’m not forgetting anything as I keep working through different chapters. Finally, and this is extremely useful for my drabbles, Scrivener allows me to add a synopsis for each chapter. Do I need to reference a specific creature that showed up in an earlier chapter? Rather than search through each chapter hoping I find it, I simply switch the view on my Scrivener and scan through the various synopses until I locate the one I’m looking for.
As someone who has gone through their fair share of writing programs, Scrivener has continued to impress me at each turn. Being able to customize the tags and metadata I use is extremely helpful no matter what project I’m working on. Professionally it allows me to easily separate what’s in progress, finished, and posted while personally, it lets me keep my dozens of ideas organized. The notebook layout makes it easy to switch between ideas and the tagging and synopsis make it easy to reference things. Having used it for four years, the only major issue I’ve run into is a lack of a mobile version for Android so I can write on the go. With that in the works for Scrivener’s Version 3 for Windows, I can’t wait to see the other new features they roll out next.
