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Scrivener Mac Review

 

Just can't say enough about Scrivener. 6 stars if it were possible. My wife and I are both writing novels in Scrivener.

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The program is just fantastic. Everything you need to organize, research and write a novel is included in the functionality of the program and doing so gets all your materials, ideas, outlines, text, etc., in one place. I could spend hours describing the cool features in Scrivener which boost creativity and productivity. The program is simply amazing, and the value per dollar for this relatively inexpensive program is off the rails.

The thing to understand about Scrivener is that it's a chunk-based writing system. It's for people who write in chunks, or scenes, which is, actually, most people.

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Unlike a linear program such as Microsoft Word, in which you start typing and then keep going until you get to the end of the work, in Scrivener, you can work on little (or big) chunks of stuff, separately. There are several key advantages of this approach. You can work on stuff in any order - if you have a cool idea for a chapter that isn't coming up for 300 more pages, you can just go work on it while the idea's fresh, and then it'll just sit in its spot, wherever you have it placed in your outline. It also allows you to move stuff around easily. For instance, if you've written 20 scenes, and decide that scene 12 should really be the first scene, you can just drag it to the beginning. You can combine multiple scenes into one, or split a scene up into multiple scenes and then move them around. So, it's kind of a modular approach to writing a long document.

Scrivener has an absolutely amazing 'corkboard' mode, where each scene gets pinned to a virtual index card, which can then be labeled (with a scene description, a title, etc.). Super Mp3 Download Problems. In corkboard mode, you can move the index cards around at will - and the text pinned to the cards moves around with them. In this way, you can quickly reorganize and restructure entire chapters or the whole book from a high-level outlining view; then, at any time, you can click on an index card and dive back into the scene's text. It's very flexible, fast, and helpful. I am not one of the 'Scrivener OR Word' crowd -- people who feel strongly that one or the other is better. I like to use both programs together. Scrivener is my master folder for a book project.

All of my notes, research documents, web pages, index cards in the outline, and written text are stored in Scrivener. However, sometimes I take an individual scene and work on it in Word. A Word document can be easily saved and edited in Dropbox, enabling easy portability for scene-development across multiple computers. When done with the scene in Word, I drag the text into Scrivener. Personally, I like Word a lot; its word processor is better than Scrivener's and it has plenty of features and refinements which reflect its twenty years of dominance in its category. What it doesn't have is the outlining tools and chunk-based paradigm of Scrivener, which I consider indispensable. I see no reason to choose between the two; they both do what they do extremely well.

In addition to individual scene development, I like to use Word to format final output. Scrivener does not offer the same refined control over print output as Word does (not yet, anyway). Basically, when I have to print something, I output from Scrivener to a Word document, open it up in Word, and play around with the formatting until it has the look I want (pagination, headers and footers, etc.). Scrivener is a very unique writing tool which is intuitively and cleverly organized around how the creative writing process actually works for most people -- in a non-linear, non-sequential manner, with more flexibility than the traditional word processor paradigm. I highly recommend checking it out if you are working on a long writing project. UPDATE August 10, 2012: I recently decided that it would be better to use Scrivener for organizing, outlining and writing, but to have another tool with better 'clipping' functionality for web-based research.