Restructuring your draft is as simple as drag and drop. Break your text into pieces as small or large as you want-so you aren’t wrestling with one long document. On the left of the window, the “binder” allows you to navigate between the different parts of your manuscript, your notes, and research materials, with ease. Scrivener puts everything you need for structuring, writing and editing long documents in easy reach.
Scrivener won’t tell you how to write-it just makes all the tools you have scattered around your desk available in one application. Outline and structure your ideas, take notes, view research alongside your writing and compose the constituent pieces of your text in isolation or in context. But Scrivener is invaluable from the word go: a word processor and project management tool that stays with you from that first, unformed idea all the way through to the final draft.
Collecting research, ordering fragmented ideas, shuffling index cards in search of that elusive structure-most writing software is fired up only after much of the hard work is over. Writing a novel, research paper, script or any long-form text involves more than hammering away at the keys until you’re done. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.
Say, I’ve written a scene with the title “Ren & Everett in club, hammered” – it’s right there, very easy to go into, cut, then paste into whatever chapter I feel it needs to be in.Īvailable for both Mac and Windows, Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. So, taking an example from Killing Ways again, I might have a list of chapters one to ten, separate files, one underneath the other, then below that, five individual – titled – scenes that I know have to fit into one of the first ten chapters. For me, it’s works so well for many reasons, but mainly because I can see to the left of the page I’m writing on, not only an entire list of my numbered chapters, but also the titles of individual scenes. I would venture it suits all kind of approaches to writing. I have no affiliation with the company, but I have a lot of love for it! Scrivener is such a customisable piece of software. The software I use is the brilliant Scrivener – it’s so writer-friendly. When international bestseller Alex Barclay sang the praises of Scrivener in this excellent article, we thought we’d investigate and find out what it’s all about. National Emerging Writer Programme OverviewĪn article from our archives – consistently one of our most popular postings!.