(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:24 am)
Last week I downloaded a trial of Scrivener, which is writing software I had heard about but never got around to trying. Scrivener is on my mind becausee I recently started a “content audit” of my past writing to create a “best of davidseah.com” section. However, after reviewing just two articles, I was horrified by how disjointed my wordsmithing can be, particularly the earlier articles. I have vowed to write with clearer intent and structure.
There’s one big problem, though: it’s slow going because it takes more passes to create writing of this nature. This post, for example, is the third simplification of the article I started to summarize the “two-week productivity reboot” I’ve been doing. I’ve probably put 7 or 8 hours into it so far, and I’m writing this blog post just so I can get something posted. Producing frequent-yet-shorter updates that helps communicate my ongoing interests is part of the 2013 Dave Seah Website Reboot; I also think this increased discipline will be good practice for writing a book. Scrivener is the software that I believe will make wrangling the hundreds of ideas related to the writing much easier.
Scrivener, if you’re not familiar with it, is a word processor that makes it easy to work with a document that is made up of many smaller chunks of text. Each chunk of text can be reordered with drag-and-drop, annotated, and tagged in many ways. That makes it possible to really play with the order of paragraphs and words without fear. With a word processor like Microsoft Word, you deal with a single long roll of text, perhaps broken up into chapters and section heads, but still one long document. Changing the order of paragraphs requires tedious and error-prone copy-paste operations. Scrivener by comparison organizes multiple text documents as easily-moved chunks in a list. You can focus on an individual section to clarify and decide where it goes later, or you can show the text in context with the overall flow. I’m just starting with Scrivener, but it already seems like it will be a great tool for organizing my “thinking-in-text”. If you’re familiar with using non-linear film editing software, you might think of Scrivener as Final Cut Pro for words: you are selecting, ordering, and combining many clips into a single linear presentation.
Anyway, much of my writing to-date (here on the blog, at least) starts out as an exploration, probing the root of an initial thought to see what conclusions might fall out of it. Because it’s an exploratory process, I rarely start with a conclusion or finding because I haven’t figured it out yet. Because of that, my writing can be very confusing if you don’t already have some context about my daily activities. I’d like to fix that, which will help new readers figure out what the hell I’m talking about. Blogging in this more-structured, to-the-point style is a bit new for me; I naturally tend to like winding conversations that eventually collide with insights to produce a useful takeaway, and I like to share the moment of discovery as opposed to packaging it as if I’ve always known it. The new approach will process those conversations into succinct, benefit-focused prose that is easier to understand and test, once the discovery has passed the Dave tests for authenticity and truthiness.
The real trick will be to produce interesting content regularly despite an increase in writing time. We’ll see what happens!
8 Comments
I’ve been curious about Scrivener for a long time and I wonder if it would really make a difference in my writing or not. But, that doubt has made me leery of spending money on it. There is a free, open source equivalent, of course, called Plume. I mentioned it briefly on my blog here: http://www.jkhoffman.com/2012/11/opensource-writing-tool/
Just thought I’d share that for anyone who, like me, is a little unsure about taking the plunge with Scrivener.
I had looked at Scrivener a while ago and thought it was too “heavyweight” for blogging, but I may have been looking at it the wrong way. I hadn’t considered using it for blogging. I’ve been blogging rarely, and each post summarizes several months of work. I’m not sure how to get out of that mode but anything that makes it easier to capture and organize my thoughts is worth a try. I’m going to try Emacs org-mode for this. It fits into my Emacs-intensive workflow and also allows moving around paragraphs/sections for organization and rearrangement.
J.K. Hoffman: I wasn’t aware of Plume, so thanks for mentioning it! Looks like it’s Linux only ATM.
I’m still getting used to Scrivener, but I’m finding that it’s already presenting some unexpected use cases that make me think that I’ll eventually buy the Mac OS X version. Unfortunately, I didn’t cash in my 50% coupon from Nanowrimo earlier. The free trial is nice, as it gives you 30 days that are used only on days you actually use it. So if you open it twice in a month and then don’t use it for the next several weeks, you still have 28 days left when you open it again!
Amit: I’ve been using Scrivener as a tool for juggling continuity. Previously, I was using a whole bunch of text files in Sublime Text 2 to keep notes and jot down related ideas. Scrivener opened up the ability to maintain my continuity drafts all within one program. The current article series on process I’m writing used to be written as I reviewed my daily text files in Sublime Text and past Trello activity to jog my memory. I just moved everything into one hierarchical folder. One program, managing many small chunks of text.
The Scrivener project has become a collection of articles in-progress that draw from my daily notes, and it’s nice to keep it all in one program. I like the “scrivening” mode that displays all the hierarchical children of a card as a continuous document, and how I can edit any one of those sections and have the relevant subdocument updated without a lot of clicking. The ability to split and combine views easily is wonderful too, as is the quick “split into new document” feature to chop a long passage of text into its own card.
So there are two approaches I’ve taken so far:
I start writing down thoughts that are unrelated to each other to figure out what I’m trying to say. I tag them with notes that explain what the purpose is. I may jump into card view and reorder them as I am thinking about them. I can jump into scrivening mode and then start expanding each nugget and link them together.
I create a new text object and start writing the post the normal way, as I might in WordPress. However, I can refer to my continuity notes WITHIN Scrivener, as I’ve moved the daily journaling INTO the same project instead of maintaining separate text files.
It’s all very new to me, though. I haven’t finished any blog posts using #1, actually, and I’ve only written a couple posts using #2.
I must say that the feel of Scrivener is reassuringly consistent and speedy, and that it immediately appealed to me. Evernote, by comparison, never has really worked for me. Possibly it is because I feel Evernote is not designed for easy comparison and reordering of collections in support of synthesis. It primarily feels like a collection program that you can use aside another tool, whereas Scrivener is like an IDE for writing.
There is a Windows version as well as a Linux version. Not sure if that actually helps you, though, since I’d imagine you do all your creative work on a Mac. The Linux version has source files, though, which you should be able to compile into a working version on whatever Mac you use. Not the easiest thing, perhaps, but I would imagine not too big a stretch for you.
Did you ever buy the OS X version of Scrivener?
J.K You know, I’m actually a die-hard Windows user, and have been since 1992. Before that, I did use Apples, but they were Apple II, IIe, and IIgs machines. I do now have a 2007 Mac laptop that used to run Windows XP for the longest time, until last year when I decided I should probably just run MacOS X on it for once (and also, with Creative Cloud, I can run on both Windows and Mac now instead of paying for two licenses $1000 licenses).
So I’m actually using the MacOS X version of Scrivener now. I bought a Windows license too, but it is kind of yucky.
I tried the trial version of Scrivener several times before I finally bought the Mac version. I was seriously skeptical that it would improve my writing speed and quality. It ended up definitely being worth the money, more so than the other writing programs I have tried over the years. I now use it for blogging and writing books, but I am also toying with using it as an electronic journal because of the ability to save web pages and emails (copy/paste) to save from printing them out and pasting them into my notebooks like I normally do. I go through a LOT of notebooks (even more for book projects before Scrivener) and it has really made a difference.
I get a lot more done on my books because now I can set a due date on the project and it will tell me how much more I need to do, which really helps to keep me motivated to write. I also love the ability to store research into the project files and the ability to rearrange the individual sections as needed.
In my opinion, it is definitely worth the money. Like you, I let a 50% NaNoWriMo coupon expire, but I found the program so helpful that I happily paid full price for it.
Annie: I’ve been doing the same thing…Scrivener has become kind of my go-to writing place, because I can keep lots of documents in it. It’s not a terrible word processor, and I am starting to actually use the “scrobbling” feature to play around with writing some longer-form content that had me stymied before.