Scrivener is a small-but-mighty piece of writing software that revolutionises the writing process for long manuscripts – book, script or academic thesis.
I hear you say, “I’ve got Microsoft Word, why would I need any other piece of software for writing?” I use Word myself, most days of the week. Word was created for business writing, and it’s very good at it. But long-form writing is different.
For long-form writing, Scrivener is now my hero.
It’s available for Mac and PC, and is cheap-as-chips.
Here’s my list of the top 3 Scrivener features that make writing easier…
1. Everything in one place
I’ll show you a screenshot first, from my thriller Poison Bay, and then I’ll tell you why it’s so remarkable (Scrivener that is, not the thriller, we can discuss that some other time 😉 ).
Friendly and unassuming, isn’t it? Here’s what I’m able to see in just one computer window:
All 130+ scenes of a 100,000 word novel.
- The scenes have brief labels in the left-hand pane, so I can remember at a glance what happens in that scene.
- Each scene behaves as a separate document, so that I can change scene order with a quick click of the mouse. And then change it back again tomorrow or next week, with another quick click of the mouse. (Try writing a book in Word with each scene as a separate document and see how much you enjoy it. And how quickly you get a restraining order from your editor! 😉 )
- The scenes are grouped in chapters (folders). I can view the MS as a single scene, a single chapter, or in its entirety as one long flowing 100,000 word piece.
The Scrivener corkboard in action.
- If I get tired of looking at all that text, I can view it as a corkboard instead, showing cards with scene summaries, modified and colour-coded to suit my needs. And yes, you can pick the cards up with your mouse and move them around at will.
- Another view is Outliner, which gives you all of the content of your index cards, but in a list.
History
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Scrivener in Outliner mode.
Ever changed your manuscript and thought, “Dang, that was better before.” Yeah, me too. I take what’s called a Snapshot at significant moments in the development of the manuscript. That’s what you’re seeing in the right-hand pane, listed by the date they’ve been made and a short description. I can quickly dip into a snapshot to see and compare previous versions, and restore the whole shebang, or copy and paste small sections.
Research
I’ll list some of the other things I also have available in that ONE COMPUTER WINDOW, to give you some inspiration for what you could include in one computer window in YOUR Scrivener project…
- Photos that I’ve taken to help me describe a setting. Right there in the window, so I can look at them while I write.
- Character descriptions.
- Audio interviews that I did when researching my novel. Yes, that’s right. Imported straight into the project as an MP3, where I can listen to it again anytime, or transcribe it. (Scrivener is now my favourite transcription tool – I’ll write another whole post on that one day, it’s become a star feature for me!)
- Pdfs of various background documents that I’m using for research. Yes, pdfs, right there to read in the same window.
- Reports from my beta readers.
- Scenes I’ve deleted. Still there and all collected in one place, so I can reinstate them, or just harvest handy things from them. Or use them later in another book or short story!
- Links to useful websites.
2. Distraction free writing
Do you ever settle in for a good long session of writing your book, script or thesis, and get distracted by emails, social media, the web or WORK? Yeah, me too. Take a look at this.
That’s called Full Screen Composition Mode. That’s the entire computer screen you’re seeing in the screenshot above, not just one window. No menu bars or popup notifications or digi-distractions of any kind. Even the Scrivener menu is hidden.
You can set it up however you like: tiny text, huge text (left the glasses at the office again, did we?), wide text pane to fit more words on screen at once, narrow text pane so you can scan the lines quickly, background image, no background image, transparent or opaque.
You can view just one scene at a time, one chapter at a time, or the whole book in one long, undistracted, uninterrupted stream.
I love this feature!
Poison Bay is about a bunch of people who get lost in the NZ wilderness, so I’ve set the background as one of my mossy-tree-trunk images from my research hike in the NZ wilderness. It helps get me in the mood for wilderness lostness. You could make it whatever you like, or completely blank. Whatever works for you and your brain and your manuscript!
3. So many output options
The Scrivener output formats list.
What happens in Vegas might stay in Vegas, but not so for Scrivener. You can output it into 20 different file formats using File > Compile. The ones I use most often myself are:
- Microsoft Word – to apply particular types of formatting, to submit it to a publisher/agent/client, or to email it to myself as an extra backup. (It also has .odt if you’re working in Open Office instead of Word.)
- Mobi ebook format – ready for publishing on Amazon, or just transferring to my own Kindle to allow me to read it with “different eyes” and see its faults and opportunities better. (The first time you use this feature, it asks you to download KindleGen from Amazon. Easy.)
- Epub ebook format – ready for publishing to iBooks, Nook, Kobo etc, or just reading on my iPhone for checking or showing to someone else.
File > Compile is a powerful feature. You can:
- Add meta data like author names and publishers and book descriptions.
- Format how the text will appear in the different file types.
- Add “separators”… for example, something like *** at the end of each scene, to signal to the reader that we are changing location or point of view. Yes, that’s right, you DON’T have to add the separators as you write.
- Insert the book cover image for an ebook.
- Generate a table of contents – especially useful in non-fiction.
- Convert links to HTML.
- Replace certain words and phrases – handy for international editions (e.g. “color” for USA, “colour” for UK and Australia).
Mac or PC?
I’m using Scrivener on Mac, which has a few extra options as the Windows version catches up. There is a list of differences on the Scrivener forum. I started using Scrivener in 2011, when Scrivener for Mac was about as advanced as Scrivener for Windows is now… and I fell in love with it back then! 🙂
I get VERY excited about Scrivener!
Image via Bigstock/llaszlo
Want to try Scrivener? Some useful links to get you started…
Screaming for Scrivener
I’m an Australian and very laid-back about most things. (It’s like the British stiff upper lip, adapted for hot weather.) But Scrivener brings me very close to screaming like a teenage girl about to meet Justin Bieber. 😉 It really has changed the way I manage long manuscripts. LOVE it!
Are you a Scrivener fan too? Tell us how you use it and what you love most about it.
Love this article. I am enamored of Scrivener! i just sat down and started using it and learned it as I went along. The more I use it and learn new things it will do, the more giddy I get over it.
There is a learning curve! But it’s fantastic software and very reasonably priced. I bought it for my daughter who was in school and for my son.
I’ve been using it for several years now Linda, and there’s still many joys for me to discover I’m sure! So many capabilities in one little piece of software. It’s made long-form writing so much easier for me. Delighted to meet another Scrivener fangirl. 😉
Great info as usual Belinda …I see I’m really late to what seems to be a great party! Really must take the plunge and get the thing. Been in the back of my mind for ages. Didn’t realise it will create docs for mobi and epub (I’m only just learning what those words even mean) so I guess it’s a great self-publishing tool.
Thanks for all the wonderful info you share.
Never too late to join the party, Andrew. You can try it out for a full month for free, which is what I did. Just remember that if you find Scrivener doesn’t suit you, you need to export your project BEFORE the month is up. 😉
I’ve been back to check out this post, Belinda. I’m going to get serious about using Scrivener now. I’m really grateful to you for this wonderful advice. Thank you. 🙂
I hope you find it as useful as I have, Norah. And I hope your writing adventures are going really well! 🙂
Check, check, check! Scrivener has tidied up my noveling life incredibly since I first started using it a couple of years ago. I’m probably accessing only about half its functionality, but that half is so much more streamlined and organized than any systems or software I’ve used before.
Thanks for the reminder that there are more exciting nuances to discover!
Great to meet another fan, Kern. I agree entirely… I’m only using half of its capability, and that half is twice as good as anything else I’ve tried. I should take some more tutorials and learn more. Soon! 🙂
I LOVE Scrivener! All my writing, from thesis to poems and short stories, lives very happily in Scrivener and I feel in control of everything. You don’t have that awful fear of losing stuff 🙂
And I love the way I can delete sections and move them to a “deleted scenes” folder… and then go back and get them later, or use them in another project. Ah, so many ways to love Scrivener… 🙂
I love Scrivener! I can’t imagine writing with anything else. I’m writing a historical fantasy, it’s so great to to be able to have all my research in the same writing program for me to refer to easily. It has so many great features, you’ve listed some of the best here but the more I use it the more I discover things I didn’t know. And when I get stuck with something there is a wonderful user forum where you can ask questions and get answers right away. If you are a writer, you NEED Scrivener!
Great to meet another Scrivener groupie, Lisa. 🙂 I love the way I can keep everything in one place. I tend to just google when I don’t know how to do anything, but that forum sounds good too.
Thanks so much for sharing this – you’ve inspired me to take the plunge. One question – does Dragon Speaking now work with Scrivener?
Dragon Dictate For Mac I mean
Good question, Cassandra. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ll test it and report back!
Thanks Belinda…look forward to hearing how you get on. Am I right then to assume you still compose draft chapters in Word and then import to Scrivener?
No, I got Dragon primarily for writing blog posts and speeches… so far I tend to use the keyboard to work on my books, and those I definitely write in Scrivener, from scratch. But I will test Dragon in Scrivener and let you know! 🙂
I’ve checked now, Cassandra, and the news is good! Dragon does indeed take dictation in Scrivener!!!! 🙂
that’s awesome!
I’m a massive Scrivener fan, too. I love the split screen facility, so I can have my notes and research in front of my as I type/edit/whatever. Being able to compile straight to mobi and epub is great, and I can’t wait for the Windows version to catch up so I can have the custom metadata – planning to use that to build simple timeframes.
Good to have you as another member of the fan club, Maggie. 🙂 Scrivener has changed my writing life. And they keep on working on the Windows version so I’m sure it will be caught-up in no time.
I had to smile at this – and copy, file, to take more time to carefully read your tips.
I was always irritated at Word, it just didn’t let me write the way I needed to. I don’t write in a beginning to end way. And I often would have Several drafts while trying to work a story out…so figured the easiest was new files. I still haven’t found the one I wanted to continue on for one YA novel I was working on. [and haven’t picked up again… partyly because of that.]
I actually did NaNoWriMo couple years ago so I could get Scrivener at half price. Hardest I’ve Ever worked for what, $20. 😉
But my husband was so impressed with it for the Mac that he actually got the Windows beta version for him to use when it first came out. He’s a computer guy, they Never do Beta, so you know it’s Good!
I still haven’t made it thro’ the tutorial. 🙁 Too busy actually using Scrivener. 😉 I’m sure not as efficiently as I could, so keep meaning to do the tutorial.
It’s such a Great product, and makes it so easy. [even without going thro’ tutorial] I actually used it to organize All the travel and travel volunteers when I did all the travel one year as a Conference volunteer! It was So Great! Everything I needed was right there! [except more money and resources 😉 ]
You have a Great Blog – Thank You!
And so glad you like Scrivener as much as I do!!!! 😉
Hi Shawna, welcome and thanks for commenting! I’m glad you love Scrivener too. And, no, I haven’t finished the tutorial yet, but hopefully one day… 😉
I don’t write in a linear way either. I write a scene here and then bounce back to somewhere else, and then to the end. Scrivener is great for that!
Continue to love Scrivener!
Give me an S! Give me a C! Give me an R! (can’t be bothered doing the rest, but you get the picture) 😀
Just found your site researching info for Beta readers. BUT I am glad to hear that Scrivener is easy to step into, even for PC users. Currently, I use Pangurpad, but the site has been fussy lately.
I have been considering Scrivener for ages, just haven’t made the leap. I think that I will! This was a really helpful rundown of “is it going to work for me?” that I have been looking for.
Hi Melissa, I’m glad you found it helpful. 🙂
The Scrivener tutorial really is very good at getting you started. There’s a learning curve with it, as with anything new, but I was writing in it within an hour or two. It was worth taking the time to do the tutorial.
This is another recent post about Scrivener from Molly Greene’s blog, and shows some of the other things you can do in Scrivener: http://www.molly-greene.com/authors-tool-scrivener/
I hadn’t heard of Pangurpad before, so thanks for mentioning that. If you’re used to writing with an online tool that provides constant backup, you might find it handy to save your Scrivener files to a Dropbox folder — that’s what I do and so it’s always being backed up whenever I’m connected to the web. 🙂
Thank you so much for this post, Belinda! I’ve been thinking about Scrivener for a while, wondering if it would improve my attitude about grappling with scene changes in an 80k manuscript. Judging by your post, it will. What’s the learning curve like?
Hi Molly, to get started fast I used the inbuilt tutorial, which is a very clever one.
They’ve actually set up a Scrivener project, and that’s the tutorial. You read the text pane, and follow the instructions, and it gradually works through all the different functions. And in front of you, you see how each function changes things. (It’s a nice friendly tutorial too, which makes jokes about cups of tea, etc.)
It took me an hour or so to import my Word doc into Scrivener, because I wanted each scene in a separate document. It’s worth taking that extra time.
And then maybe 1.5 to 2 hours of working through the tutorial.
Of course, I got tired of stepping through the tutorial at some point (short attention span 😉 ), and just wanted to get started, so I did! And then when I didn’t know how to do something, I’d either go back to the tutorial again, or I’d google it, and find someone who’d written an article on that one particular thing.
So yes, there’s a learning curve, but now that you are getting to the editing and reworking stage of your sequel, this is a good time to transfer! I know some editors who work in Scrivener, transferring their clients files across, because they find it so much more powerful than Word for the big editing.
I also have a short attention span and tend to Google every single question I ever have about ANYTHING … so I’m with you on that. Not sure I’ll do Scrivener with this mss (depends on what my beta readers say, lol!) but would definitely like to make the next novel-length project easier to manipulate. Thanks again!
Great post, Belinda. Thanks for reminding me of some of the features I saw in the tutorial but haven’t used yet.
Molly, after thinking about waiting until the next book to start in Scrivener, I took the leap and imported my current m/s. It’s been a smooth transition, aside from some quotation marks coming across in the import as two sets of quotation marks. I did the same thing as Belinda — went through part of the tutorial, then got impatient and just started working in it. So far, so good. Some of the tricks and shortcuts are different (as in, don’t follow the Microsoft-set industry standard) but a lot of things are either intuitive or similar to other programs. I think learning to use it is pretty easy. It’s learning to use ALL of it that will come over time.
Thanks for your input, Laura. I know there’s many features I’m not currently using, too. Some because they’re not relevant to me, but others because I just haven’t found them yet!
I’m glad I took the leap mid-project too. Now that I know what Scrivener can do, I’d hate to have been wrestling with a Word doc while I was doing the huge edit and rewrite on Poison Bay.
I think what’s holding me back is the idea of having to type in EVERY scene in an 80k mss – sounds like that’s the only way Scrivener could help me move them around. Oh, if only I had an assistant :-]
No no no, Molly! No typing. Copy and paste.
I can understand why you didn’t want to retype 80,000 words. Quelle horreur! (horrifies me so much, I break out into French 😉 )
(Or did you just mean that it will take time to do the copy and paste…)
No, no, no, Belinda and Molly! No copy/paste! Import! And if your chapters/scenes are in separate Word docs, you can do a global import of them all at once (select multiple Word files when you’re doing the import).
Haha! MORE things for me to learn about Scrivener! 🙂