5 Tips to Help You Reach the Finish Line with Scrivener

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Scrivener, a NaNoWriMo 2017 sponsor, is an award-winning word processor and project management program that has been enthusiastically adopted by best-selling novelists and novices alike. Today, they share some of their top tips to help you keep writing through the end of the month:

It’s November 22th, and for Wrimos everywhere, the end is in sight. Some of you might be putting together your finishing touches—but for many others, chances are that by this point in the month, you’re feeling pretty fatigued. Maybe you’re getting tired of elements of your story, or are stuck on resolving a particular plot point; perhaps the names of your characters don’t trip off the tongue; or perhaps you’re at that dangerous point of despair where you think the words are wonderful but they are all in the wrong order. Take heart. If any of that that sounds like you, read on…

Here at Literature & Latte, we’ve been taking part in NaNoWriMo for years, as well as answering questions from other Wrimos who have been using Scrivener—our app for writing long texts such as novels—about how it can help them keep going to the month’s end. From this, we’ve put together five tips to help you keep pushing on over the finish line:

1. Keep an eye on your targets. 

In Scrivener’s Mac version (and coming to Windows) you can set a deadline and then see how many words you have to write each day to reach your goal. Knowing you’ve met your target for today will make tomorrow that much less daunting.

2. Keep up that forward momentum. 

If you’re stuck on a section, jump ahead to another part you know you need to write. Put it into a new document in your Scrivener project and place it somewhere at the end of the Draft folder or in an “Unplaced Scenes” folder. It will count towards your word count and you can then go back and create other sections before it to fill in the gaps. Writing a later scene might just unlock ideas about what needs to lead up to it.

3. Set yourself some waypoints. 

Open the Draft folder in outliner mode and create some blank documents with titles and short synopses that tell you where you’re going—just rough it out. These can just be a handful of major waypoints vaguely leading to the end of your book. Now you can work towards them, filling in the spaces in between, and completing the waypoint text when you get there. They’ll sit in the binder (Scrivener’s source list) and make sure you know where you’re going. And if the plot suddenly veers, you can change them or delete them as needed. Having a destination can help you keep moving forward even if you decide to change course later.

4. Integrate your inspiration.

Stuck on a description? Find an image of a character or location for inspiration. In Scrivener, you can place it in the split editor right alongside your writing.

5. Use a name generator.

If you suddenly find you need to bring in a different character, don’t waste time thinking too hard about the name. Use Scrivener’s name generator. You can always use Project Replace to replace it with a name that works better later.

Most importantly: don’t despair. It’s not uncommon when you’re this far into the month to be wondering if yours is the worst draft ever written. It’s not. (You haven’t seen some our ours!) Remember Terry Pratchett’s quote about first drafts: “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” And Stephen King’s: “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open”. The important thing right now is to get your thoughts down and explore your idea’s possibilities. To help, you can switch to full screen mode in Scrivener to block out distractions and ignore the internal editor so that you can just get on and write.

And now a little note about us—if you’re enjoying using Scrivener, or are curious to find out more, we have some news. Scrivener was first unleashed upon the world right here, on the NaNoWriMo forums, way back in 2005. Twelve years later, we’ve just released our biggest update yet, with Scrivener 3 for macOS (Windows 3.0 will be following next year).

Scrivener was originally built around four core ideas: write your novel in sections as small or large as you like and easily rearrange them; add synopses to sections so that it is easy to work with an overview of the manuscript; view research and other sections side-by-side with your writing; export your work using different formatting for different requirements.

Scrivener 3 takes all of this to the next level. Scrivener’s export features are now easier to use but even more powerful. We’ve added ePub 3 and improved Kindle support. There’s a full styles system, making it easier to simpler to format your text, and you can review how much you’ve written each day using the new Writing Statistics feature. You can even track story threads with index cards on coloured lines.

All these improvements are designed to help you get writing and keep writing. We hope you’ll give them a try and enjoy using them—but most importantly, that they’ll help you get where you’re going with your 50,000 words. Good luck!