The Hell With Scrivener

If you hang around writerly types online for more than about twenty minutes, someone will start singing the praises of Scrivener.  People will tell you that it revolutionized their process and such things, and if you click over to the website, you'll quickly get the idea that all the cool kids are using it.  

42 years old, and I am still vulnerable to this kind of appeal. Pathetic.  

So I downloaded the first version and worked for a while on a project that was ultimately rejected by an editor who kept asking for stuff and then turning it down.  I didn't really see what the big deal was.  I tend to write my way into stories rather than outlining my way in, so all the organizational features didn't do much for me. I wrote a scene that took place outside a particular convenience store, and I was able to have a picture of the store in the pane below while I wrote the scene.  Which was kind of cool, I guess.  But not 40 bucks worth of cool. 

And then time passed and they released another version, and I heard more people sing its praises, and I started work on a project that's more plot-driven than my usual character-driven stuff, so I figured I'd try it again. 

While the peer pressure thing was still in play, I fell victim to another part of Scrivener's appeal.  If we have a complicated software package to learn, then we must be doing real work! Otherwise, we're just sitting around making up stories!  

So I tried it again.  With about 40 pages of an existing work under my belt, I started breaking it into chapters.  And promptly lost two of them somewhere in the novel template. They may still be there. Or they may have disappeared into a rip in the space-time continuum.  Probably if I had invested another 15 minutes or so, I might have found it.  So that's one danger. (I had backups.)

Another danger: I was futzing with Scrivener instead of writing.  It felt like work, because I was messing around with An Invaluable Tool That Real Writers Use, but I wasn't actually making any progress on my novel.  

So, look--you may be one of those people for whom Scrivener is a godsend.  Good for you.  But if you donwload the trial version and find that it's getting in the way of your writing instead of helping it, I just want to tell you that it's not just you. Maybe this software is just not for you.  Guess what: you can still be a real writer without it.

I wrote an outline and saved it in Evernote, and returned to my favorite word processing program, Mariner Write, which I like because it's way simpler and more intuitive than Microsoft Word. It gets out of my way and lets me write.