Scrivener and process

Scrivener is currently one of the best-known pieces of writing software out there. People who use it tend to love it and go all evangelical about it (as a number of commenters noted two posts ago). It occurred to me while reading all those comments that talking a bit about what it is, what it does, and how different people do and don’t find it useful might be interesting from a process standpoint, as compared to a use-this-tool standpoint.

Let’s start with this: I’ve tried to use Scrivener as my primary word processor, and after two years I gave up. Here is why:

Scrivener was designed, as near as I can tell, for writers who are fiddlers – the folks who think of a few lines of dialog that are just exactly how those two characters would discuss petunias, but who don’t currently have a scene in which the characters could or would talk about petunias. Or they’re in the middle of an action scene and suddenly realize something important about the angsty background of a character who isn’t even present. It’s for the writers who assemble their writing from pieces that move in and out of their drafts as the story changes and they get new and better ideas during the writing process, some of which turn out not to be better. And it’s for the writers who simply can’t stand the possibility that they’ll cut a line, a page, or a paragraph and then, weeks or months later, discover that they want it after all.

Scrivener is not my primary word processor because I don’t work this way. I don’t really like having my manuscript lying around in little pieces, no matter that they can be reassembled at the touch of a button. One of the joys of my first word processor was that I had a whole chapter available all at the same time, rather than five separate pieces of paper. I was delighted when storage capacity got large enough for me to have the whole manuscript available in one file. Scrivener, which has the bits-and-pieces model of writing built right into its interface and processes, is never going to be my first choice for writing.

But.

But I do use Scrivener. I use it when I have a lot of notes and reference materials to organize. I really like being able to have my character notes and plot idea notes and the text of a fairy tale and various pertinent quotations and the text of my query letter and both drafts of the outline from the portion-and-outline, all available in the same place, indexed and easy to find. This turns out to be where I use the bits-and-pieces method: when I’m figuring out the characters, plot, background, backstory, and all the other ancillary material that I come up with as part of my novel-writing process.

I personally don’t fiddle with my drafts in a way that would make Scrivener a useful tool for writing them. I do fiddle with my before, during, and after notes in just that way. It’s possible that it would also be extremely useful as a revisions tool, for somebody, but I don’t think I have the patience to take my first draft to pieces just so I could check them all and then reassemble them.

For the current WIP, I started off in Scrivener. (I confess, at that point I was still trying to make it work for me as my main word processor.) I put in what I had: a log line, two versions of the text of the query letter, and a first crack at expanding the query into a proper submission-ready outline. Then I poked around online, and added several lists of possible character names from various sources. I made a list of roles: Mom, Dad, brother, Head Minion, Second Minion, Castle Steward, Evil Aunt, Wannabe Dark Lord. I copied the list to a different segment and started trying to match up roles with suitable names. I started another segment to capture worldbuilding ideas, and one for plot possibilities. I decided to chuck the existing outline, so I started a new section for the new-and-different outline.

I wrote a third, very messy outline intended for myself rather than for an editor, with lots of parenthetical comments (“Tour of castle? Anniversary photos!”) that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. I opened another section for the five or six characters who by this time had names, and started fleshing out their roles in the story – what their problems are, how they relate to the other characters and/or my plot, and what they think they want (all of which boils down, one way and another, into what all the subplots are and how they cross and interrelate). At that point, I thought Scrivener was great.

Then I started on Chapter One, and things pretty much fell apart. I made three different runs at writing Chapter One via the bits-and-pieces method, and none of them worked. Part of the problem, of course, had nothing to do with the bits and pieces; it had to do with the location I started in and the resulting character reactions. The thing was, writing it in Scrivener all split up into bits and pieces made it harder for me to see what the real problem was. It wasn’t until I switched to a different word processor and had the whole chapter in one place that I could see and fix what was wrong.

I like having all my notes and character lists and throwaway ideas organized, but I don’t want them right there when I’m writing. I don’t mind having them available – currently I keep my manuscript in one file in the manuscript-only word processor, and leave Scrivener open in the taskbar so I can refer to my notes easily if I need to. For some reason, that works for me, but having them all in the same program with my first draft doesn’t. A writer’s mind is a strange and not-altogether-logical place.

For people who do like to fiddle and who do like having their work pre-split-up into easily rearrangeable chunks, or who perhaps find looking at two paragraphs or a scene or a chapter less intimidating than looking at the entirety of their manuscript thus far, or who want all their notes and reference materials right there in the sidebar all the time while they’re writing, Scrivener is just the thing.

For the curious, my current word processor is yWriter. It’s a lot like Scrivener, and I’d really rather be using the plain vanilla word processor that was my workhorse for a good fifteen years, but it doesn’t run under Windows 7. What I like best about yWriter are the statistics, especially the little box in the taskbar at the bottom that tracks wordcount – total, this chapter, and what I’ve done so far today. (Monday was bad; I clocked -47 words on Monday…) Other than that, it has a lot of bells and whistles that I can and do ignore; the main thing is that it feels comfortable and it thinks the way I do, meaning that when I want to do something a little unusual that I know a word processor ought to be able to do but that I’m not quite sure how to do in this word processor, I can almost always find it easily without looking at the documentation. MSWord thinks like an alien – in MSWord, it takes me at least ten or twelve tries to find anything, even after I’ve looked at the documentation. Scrivener is somewhere in the middle; I’ve done enough with it to be pretty sure that I could make it work for me, but it would take a while and some adjusting. yWriter works for me right now.

As Alicia said, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (OK, she said it a lot more elegantly than that.)