Writing Life

Making Hasty Judgments about Scrivener

I was just checking out what's happening in one of the writer's groups I'm in. It was sad to see someone slam Scrivener and refer to it as junk and a waste of money. Apparently, the individual was impatient and never actually used the software. I admit - it has a learning curve and a half. But, once you take the time to understand it, it becomes priceless.

If the individual would have been more patient, they would have discovered how great it is to split the screen and see the index cards you're working on. One look at the cards and you know without any additional clicking what stage that card is in. In other words, is it still part of the outline, draft, or first edit. It's written across the card. For me, that's incredibly handy. I don't have to click out of the scene I'm working on to know the status of other scenes. It's all right there on the split. Trust me, when you're editing that's incredibly helpful.

I also love being able to write a quick note without any additional clicking in the note section in the lower right. I can write thoughts on the scene or something totally unrelated to writing. It's just a quick way of getting it out of your head so you can work on the scene at hand.

Scrivener also holds all your research in the research notebook. Brilliant! It's a time saver and a half. I'm not trying to remember where the heck I put my research notes. Yes, I could use Evernote to store them, but that's another piece of software to load onto my laptop. Ah, but you don't need to do that, right? You can go straight on the net and get it. That's fine, but I don't always have internet access. So, Scrivener to the rescue. :)

Something else I found annoying was the claim that they paid around $100 for Scrivener. Rubbish. It's $45, and worth every penny.

Ok, rant over. :)