If you write stuff, you should know about Scrivener
/
I bought Scrivener a few years back as part of a MacHeist bundle. I’ve always liked the way that it lets you organise your writing. It seems to have been created by writers for writers. I played with it for a while at the time but then I ended up back using Microsoft Word to write all my stuff because I was working with a bunch of folks who also used Word. This is not a problem, as Word is a great place to work. However, recently I was wondering if Scrivener could help me when creating magazine articles. These have well defined structure and content and are associated with lots of assets, web links and images. They require a lot of tinkering during the writing process, because getting the sequence of the elements doesn’t come easily (at least for me) and you are always battling against a particular word count.
Earlier this week I took another look at Scrivener with a view to using it on a few solo projects. One particular attraction is the way that you take a single version of the core text and then “compile” it for different destinations. One of the destinations could be an e-Pub book. This is very interesting to me, as I’ve not found a way of working with text that lets me do this cleanly. I end up using Calbre (another wonderful program) on an a copy of my text that I’ve exported from Word. This is not optimal I have to do a lot of fiddling to make it all fit together and it makes version control really hard. So today I fired up Scrivener and spent most of the day playing with it. This is what I’ve learned so far:
A document is made up of a bunch of text items.
A text item can be a folder and they can be nested. In this case the text in the text item is included in the output before the nested items. You can use this to make a structured outline of a document.
You can browse the entire document at a high level and will automatically move between the text items that it comprises.
A text item can have a synopsis text, as well as a bunch of other properties including type.
A document is compiled into a single output element (pdf, word, epub, html etc) by the compile process.
The compile process is controlled by a template that specifies the mapping of layouts onto sections types. Each text item is assigned a section type. There are also sections that you can apply to text sequences inside a text item.
You use different templates to format the output for different platforms. Templates can contain conditional elements, so that you can have things like a “Mac” and a “PC” version of a core text.
A given layout contains specified properties of a text item to be included in the output. This means you can generate a "synopsis" document by creating a template using layouts that only include only the synopsis element. You can make your own layouts. A layout can also contain prefix and postfix items to be put around the text using that layout when it is compiled, as well as having lots of font and formatting options. You can include placeholders in layouts to create automatically numbered sections.
Text items can be tagged and there are very comprehensive search and grouping commands.
A project can contain a research element that holds text, images or even web sites. The web sites are copied into the project (although this doesn't always work). You can also add research documents, for example a list of web sites.
It contains visualisation tools like maps and corkboards to allow you to play with your ideas for the document structure. It also lets you checkpoint your writing so that you can always get back to a “known good” state.
The slant of most most of the templates is towards fiction and drama, which is an interesting direction I’ve never really tried before. But you never know….
Scrivener is extremely powerful stuff. Its documentation runs to 750 pages and the learning curve is quite steep, although a lot of the functionality is built on things that you’d really want to do if you were writing a book, a play or an article. I think I’m going to find it very useful for magazine articles. It’s not horribly expensive, being a bit cheaper than a video game. But if you write any kind of text for a living (or even for fun) I think it is well worth a look. It might even change your life….
