Wednesday, November 10, 2010

10 Things I Love About Scrivener

I spent the last week finalizing the rewrites to my manuscript. The entire work was done in my tool of choice - Scrivener 2.0.

[Legal Disclaimer #1: just because my blog's name has the word "scrivener" in it, I am not affiliated with the developers... unless they want me to be... call me... we can do lunch!]

The good people at Literature & Latte have released the much anticipated version 2.0 of their tool. Let me be clear, they've always had the best tool... but this release put me in a poetic mood:

[Legal Disclaimer #2: some of this content is stolen from the developer's web site... it's for educational purposes!]

1) You keep me honest: What's your word count goal? Set it, achieve it.



2) You keep me on track: Set your daily goal and beat it... (don't judge me... I'm in rewrite mode)



3) You let me change my mind: Snapshots rule! Version control? Compare documents? Scrivener does that on steroids!


4) You let me play around with cards: I like being able to storyboard my ideas, move the scenes around and see the flow of the narrative



5) You let me look at my work on my iPad: ebook output is phenomenal! The formatting is spot on. Calibre? Fo'get about it! Write it at night, ebook it to my iPad before I go to bed, review my previous day's work while drinking coffee in the morning (double espresso Illy brand coffee).

6) You let me get inspired while I write: Import pictures of locations, people, etc. Side by side, look at image and translate what you see into words


7) You let me synch with dropbox: Love that cloud thing


8) You let me synch with SimpleNote on the iPad: Edit on the train, plane or automobile (hopefully while someone else is driving...)


9) You let me compile the whole thing in a beautifully formatted manuscript: I find that I don't need to do much formatting (at least during this stage of my writing) or export to Word. I am self-sufficient on one tool.

10) You read to me, when my eyes are too tired to read: Ok. So maybe you feel that I should have ended with more umph... I'm tired okay. But, this is a big deal for me. Hearing my novel read back to (granted by a funny voice who can't pronounce my heroine's name properly) is very powerful. My story is driven by conversations... hearing it out loud helps me improve the flow


Great tool. Great support. These guys get it. I better go. I'm getting emotional again :)

2 comments:

  1. You're right on all counts, I'm loving loving LOVINg Scrivener too! I'm discovering it because:
    A) I'm a NaNoWriMo participant (first time), and
    B) I now have a Mac because my PC died one too many times and a friend gave me his old Power PC.

    I'm glad that happened.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow looks like things have changed a lot since the last time I tried Scrivener. Will have to give it a second look.

    ReplyDelete

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