I want to preface this post by saying that no one program will work for everyone. This is what works for me. If you have a program that already works for you, keep it! Don’t fix what isn’t broken. If you are flailing and looking for something new, Scrivener might be for you.
When I started writing, home computers were just coming on the market. Does anyone remember the Commodore 64? Yeah, I know, I just really dated myself. We didn’t have a Commodore 64. We couldn’t afford something like that. I made do with my mom’s Smith Corona typewriter that had a tiny (maybe 20 character) word processing screen. When I graduated high school, my parents bought me a Smith Corona word processor that was really just a typewriter attached to a monitor. Personal computers were much more of a thing but way outside my price range.
I saved, and I saved, and I saved some more, and finally in the second year of my Master’s degree, I bought my first PC. It had become clear that writing my thesis and later dissertation required more than what I had. Back then, Microsoft hadn’t yet cornered the word processing software market so I bought a program called Word Perfect. It worked. Mostly. Sort of. It wasn’t good for long documents. Formatting was a bitch. I screamed at my computer. A lot. I made offerings of whiskey to it. Smudged sage around it. Eventually, it churned out both the thesis and dissertation.
By this point, the reason that I had originally borrowed my mother’s Smith Corona—fiction writing—had fallen by the wayside. Academic writing took an all-consuming presence in my life. I was writing mostly short papers at this point, so my transition from Word Perfect to Microsoft word wasn’t too bad.
Then I got the itch to write fiction again. I tried to use Word. I really did. And I about lost my mind! There was no good way to organize it. One long document? Very hard to find the exact place you want to edit, cut, paste, insert, etc. Lots of little documents? What was that file name I saved it under? Ugh. I was so frustrated.
Around this time, I decided to do NANOWRIMO—National Novel Writing Month. They had partnered with Scrivener and were offering a healthy discount on their software. They also had a free trial, which I did first, and it was a godsend!
The software is set up like the physical binder I have on my desk. I can set it up by chapter and scene. I can easily switch between editing a small section or the longer document. There are even note cards that I can color code to my little nerd heart’s content. There is a place to store electric copies of all my research—everything from jpegs to urls to notes—it’s all in one place so no more frantically opening files trying to find the one I want but can’t remember the file name of.
Scrivener has tons of function, bells and whistles and I probably don’t use half of them. There is a learning curve to the software, I won’t lie. But there are numerous tutorials available both embedded in the program and on the Literature and Lattes website to help you. YouTube also has tons of videos that are helpful. I have even invested in a course or two (especially after their last big upgrade.)
One really nice thing about Scrivener is they let you try it before you buy it. There is a free trial download which I heartily suggest. The trial version is exactly the same as the paid version but expires after 30 days of use. That 30 days of use is great too because if you use it every day you get thirty straight days but if you only use it twice a week it will last 15 weeks. You can actually use it as you need it.
I have friends that love Scrivener. I have friends that think that Satan himself designed it. It is what works for me during the draft stages of my novel. Every once in a while I do still have to pull out the smudge sticks but not nearly as often as before.
While I didn’t “win” NANOWRIMO that year (or any year for that matter), I won in the sense of finding a computer program that works with the way my mind does. Scrivener saved my sanity and probably my writing career.