Last time I talked about Scrivener  I said I would get back to it after NANOWRIMO. So, that’s where we’re going today dear reader. Actually, we’ll be talking about Scrivener this week and next week, there’s enough to say just based on my first draft experience.

This still won’t be an entire, comprehensive review of Scrivener (I spent the last month writing a first draft not just learning a software package…), but I definitely learned some things during NANOWRIMO that have shown me a thing or two and will affect my writing process from here on out.

First… A general statement: If you make the jump to Scrivener from other programs like MS Word there will definitely some habits that need reshaping. The nature of the software is such that it works differently. But, if you’re going to work on writing a book, it’s worth the effort to make the change. Once you’ve learned to use Scrivener, some parts of the writing process become much easier. And… some specialized tricks and features available if you have both Scrivener and MS Word.

Next… The things I wasn’t fond of (but can live with…):

Formatting (While Writing):

The standard format that Scrivener works in is RTF and the screen view you see while you’re writing is basic and doesn’t reflect the layout that will exist on the printed page. This is something that takes getting used to., at this point in the game (working on the first draft and early edits) layout doesn’t matter as much for a book or story. There is enough editing and other moving around that needs to happen that you’re not seeing a finished product yet anyway.  Scrivener’s way of dealing with formatting has big payoffs later, but if you’re used to functioning in MS Word, or are a very visual person, this can be off putting.

Printing (a piece at a time):

Over the years, I’ve developed a habit of printing out the day’s written work and adding it to a physical copy of the book. Well, that gets more complicated with Scrivener. In Scrivener you need to compile before you print, so there’s another step. If you compile to print, there’s no dialog box to choose which pages to print.

Don’t get me wrong, you can tell it to print only certain sections of the writing but you have to make those selections before you compile to print. And, as a result, you don’t get the same pagination you would when printing a section of a Word document.

There are workarounds, for instance you could compile to a pdf and then print part of the pdf. But if you want to print the latest part of a work in progress on a regular basis, you might end up with a bunch of PDFs that have to be deleted or stored…

But, in the “print today’s work” method pagination can get off anyway if you insert a section between parts you’ve already written. So, you’re not giving up a lot. And, like I said, things will change between first draft and ready to publish, so the “print your daily work” method has pagination problems anyway.

Chapter titles and finding stuff

Within a scrivener project you have folders and text documents. For a fiction manuscript, when you compile the document the folder names become chapter names and the documents within the folders become chapter content. This can cause headaches when you have sub folders you forget about. You should also remember you need not type chapter titles into the documents within the folders.

Once you see how it works, it seems to work well. But, I still have to figure out headings and subheadings within a chapter (not so much for my mid-grade novel, but I’ll want them for other projects…)

Summing up the negatives

The issues I’ve mentioned are more about getting used to a different program and work flow. There are ways around them and ways to cope with them. Though it takes effort I think working in Scrivener is worth the investment.

Next week, we’ll look at what I really liked about Scrivener while working on the first draft process. If you’ve got any thoughts so far, leave a comment.  And, come back next week for part two!