If you’re a Mac user and you do any writing at all, you should take a look at Scrivener. At first, you’ll think it’s a word processor, but you’ll find it’s a lot more interesting and useful. My 30-day trial period just ended, and I paid for it without hesitation.
Basically, Scrivener makes it easy to break your writing down hierarchically. So, if you organize your writing around an outline, even a really simple one in your head, Scrivener makes it easy to put your ideas where they fit within the outline, to be fleshed out in situ or moved around, or whatever.
I discovered Scrivener by way of 43 Folders, a blog I follow to satisfy my inner geek. Merlin Mann does a better and more thorough job of explaining it than I do, so feel free to just jump over to his review.
By the way, Merlin’s non-linear approach to writing sounds a lot like the way I compose. I think it’s a good way to work actually.
If you write like I do (and I pray that you do not), you have a messy approach to drafting that is iterative, intuitive, and far from linear. You do a brain dump, then type a little, then research a little, then type a little more, then move a bunch of stuff around, then groan aloud, then 80% start over and so on until something is done. Yes, it would be more tidy if we all followed the mandate of our elementary school teachers and wrote perfect 5-paragraph essays straight from a completed outline. But, such is life. And Scrivener seems to get that.
What It Does
There are several views of your work. The basic working view is a folder tree on the left, representing your outline, or whatever kind of hierarchy you have, and your writing on the right.
So, let’s say you’re writing a little biography of Bartók. You might create several outline items in the tree on the left, say, Early Life, Conservatory, Folk Music Collecting, Works, Emigration. Under “Works”, you can then put any number of sub-items (piano, orchestral, chamber, choral, etc.), and so on. If you start out inspired to write about Bartók’s emigration, it’s now very easy to just start there. Later, you may decide to be clever and open with his emigration. So, you just drag that item up to where you want it in the tree.
When you’ve filled in all your content, Scrivener will export the whole thing into whatever real word processor you like for final editing and polishing.
There’s another view, which is kind of interesting. It’s a corkboard, with all of your notes presented as index cards pinned to it. You can double click any index card to drill down to any sub-items on a new corkboard.
I’ve only scratched the surface of what Scrivener can do. In the past month, I’ve used it to prepare a pre-concert talk, and I’m now using it to organize the lyrics for the musical I’m now working on. (And I’m using it to write this post.)
