Update: Scrivener and Me

I have a brief update on my working with Scrivener to share. I wanted to blame Scrivener for the lack of progress I had with my crime novel. I was writing scene by scene according to the outline. Trying to keep it all organized and fit into the binder as I had set it up, I thought, was stifling my progress, but that’s not true.

I have my new WIP in Scrivener and it is flowing very well. I have a steady pace and there are a couple of tiny features that I am thrilled with. They may not seem like much, trivial in the greater scope of things, but they are a huge asset to me in time management.

First, this little box pops up in the middle of your document when you click a small button at the bottom of your page. You can set your word count for a writing session, or for the document length.

If I want to assure 1000 words in a session, it is easy to monitor. See how the little bar at the bottom of the page turns from red, to orange, to yellow to green as you meet your goal. It is small thing, but really useful to me.  I am a very visual person and the color is in my peripheral vision as I type.

The word and character count for each scene/chapter document is also at the bottom center of the page.

I have set up my binder different from how I had it with the crime novel. Instead of setting up chapter folders and moving between each scene, I have it set up to do a full chapter as a scene.  That is more comfortable to me with a linear writing style, since I prefer it over plotting. It will still set up an outline in my outliner as I move along.

I can move chapters around in the binder above, break the chapters into scenes if need be, move them around, and edit easily with the split screen as below.

Gwen Hernandez, author of “Scrivener for Dummies”, has her awesome online classes coming up in February. These are terrific whether you are a novice or a seasoned pro. There is still time to register:

http://gwenhernandez.com/2013/12/19/scrivener-online-courses-now-open-for-registration/

The most exciting thing to me is that when I am all done, I make some adjustments, punch a button and compile a .mobi or .epub for my beta readers.

Funny what excites us, huh?

Filed under: Writing Process/WIPs Tagged: online classes., registration reminder, Scrivener update, tiny features