You know, it seems I keep reading of yet one writer after another all recommending Scrivener.
There was actually a huge delay (2 years) in my getting Scrivener. I was using Ywriter because it’s free, and it has very useful features that are very scrivener like. And I delayed getting it, because there was features in Ywriter that Scrivener didn’t have.
Then I got Scrivener. Being trained as an old-world computer programmer (back in the days of Cobol), I know something about programs – most people use about 30% of the features of any one program. So I sat down to learn how to do all the things with Scrivener most people don’t.
I found out with Meta Tags, and the outliner, I can actually place those functions I liked in Ywriter into Scrivener! I wanted to know WHEN a scene was (my novels are time-limited), WHERE it is, WHO is in it, and WHOSE POV it is.
So, some quick fiddling with meta tags and the outliner (you can customize the outliner view), I can now see all those functions.
Then there’s collections. In the binder, you can create collections of all the scenes involving one character. This is similar to the function in “Fade In” where you can look at all the dialogue for any character and edit it at once, to make sure the voicing of the character is consistent throughout your screenplay.
What blows my mind is that when Jerry Jenkins, Michael Hyatt and others are all saying the single most important writing tool is Scrivener… why are people still writing novels in Microsoft word???
