on the wrong side of sunrise

Tag: programs

Scrivener: Worth It, Worth It, Worth It

Scrivener. What can I say about Scrivener?

Well, in short, it kicks the collective ass of the other word processors I’ve used.

I first learned of Scrivener in October of 2010. I had come across a glowing review of a program called Liquid Story Binder and was intrigued enough that I decided to download the 30-day trial. This decision was followed by the Mac-user heartbreak of Windows-only software. Dejected, I searched for a Mac-friendly version and stumbled upon Scrivener. I was still hurting from Liquid Story Binder’s rejection; I downloaded the Scrivener trial, prepared to be disappointed.

Only then I was not.

I consider myself a novelist at heart, and from a purely logistical perspective, Scrivener makes it much simpler to get a handle on, and then keep track of, that sort of long project. In a traditional word processing program, I’d end up with a couple hundred pages all in one chunk, and if I wanted to navigate between scenes, I could scroll back and forth—or search for “Chapter Three” or a unique phrase. With Scrivener, though, I could organize it differently:

Along the left side, I have different levels of inclusiveness. If I want, I can select “Draft” and see the entire thing. Or I can select a specific chapter, or even a specific scene within a chapter. At the top right is another tool that helps with organization: the index card. This allows me to write a short summary of what occurs in that scene, so that I can look at a cork board visual of a multi-item section:

In that shot, you can also see the colored tabs in the corner, which come from the next box down from the index card editor: labels. In this particular project, I have multiple viewpoint characters, so labeling scenes with their narrator helps me see how that balances out and, if I want, view only the scenes from one character’s perspective. In the box below that are any notes I want to make that don’t need to show up on the index card.

Back on the left, below the actual draft text, is the research folder, where I can take notes and import PDFs, images, video and audio clips, and more:

Essentially, what this all adds up to is one document in one application that does everything I would do in several files in several applications in several levels of folders.

(All those features, by the way, made it very useful for taking notes in class, writing multi-part papers, and organizing my graduate school application materials as well.)

In case you’re wondering, yes, I can import Word documents. And what’s more, I can save my own writing as a Word document—or PDF, rich text, Open Office, and several eBook formats. With Scrivener, I can take a novel and format it for Kindle, including everything from a cover image and author information to a hyperlinked table of contents. This feature does require a bit of trial and error at first to get all the different formatting options set, but it’s worth it.

That’s my rating of Scrivener as a whole. Absolutely 100% worth it. At the moment, it’s $35–45, and it’s worth it. There is a learning curve, and although I’m not someone who typically does tutorials, I recommend the Scrivener one, which is worth it. If you’re part way through a project, or even working on revising a completed draft, transitioning to a new format takes time, but it is—you know where this is going—worth it.

On that repeated note, I’m off to my current novel in progress Scrivener.

Trapped in the Pages

In 1973, John Platt published an article called “Social Traps” in American Psychologist. The idea of a social trap is simple enough. From the abstract:

[Platt] Uses the term “social trap” to describe situations like a fish trap, where individuals, organizations, and societies get started in a direction that later proves unpleasant or lethal but difficult to back out of; actions or inactions prompted by self-interest create long-range effects that are to almost no one’s interest.

The easiest illustration is on a personal level (what Platt calls an “individual trap”) where a short-term gain comes with long-term loss. Let’s say I smoke a pack a day. I recognize that my habit has costs—it costs money to buy cigarettes, it costs time to step out and smoke, it costs health, etc. The trap comes in when I realize that, even if I might one day be rewarded for quitting, right now, if I go too long without a smoke, I’ll be punished.

It’s a little like telling someone, “If you walk across the room, I’ll give you fifty bucks,” and then punching them every time they take a step.

Through individual and social traps, we get stuck in all sorts of inefficient, counterproductive routines. It can be small things—the sort of things we might not give much thought. Maybe it’s as simple as taking a long route to work because figuring out a better one would take more time and energy than just going the way we know. I, for instance, have been a Mac user as far back as I can remember, so when it comes to word processing programs, ClarisWorks/Appleworks/Pages have been an individual trap of mine.

How much time and hassle could I have saved over the years if my files were .doc, like everyone else’s? How much easier would it have been to read other people’s work if I could open their files on my computer without worrying about formatting losses? How much better would I be at working with the ubiquitous Microsoft Word if I had learned it from the start, rather than becoming proficient in a less useful, less prevalent program?

Of course, there are costs with pursuing Word at a later stage. The Office Suite costs money, for one, and there’s a learning curve—for a period, I would be less efficient than I am in Pages. Pages is, in its way, sufficient.

Still, I’ve been working on investments. I started using a program called Scrivener a little while ago, and I’m experimenting with other programs. I’m trying to find the most effective, efficient way to go through the different stages of writing, and I’ve come to grips with the fact that I’ll pay a price up front. This is what it takes to break out of the individual trap.

In the next few posts, I’ll be discussing first my experience with Scrivener (spoiler: I love it) and then my explorations into a few other programs: Scapple, for idea mapping, and Aeon Timeline, for timeline tracking. Learning to work with new programs designed for unique functions comes at a price; I’ll aim to decide if these are worth it.

Stay tuned.

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