I recently bought a program called
Scrivener, which helps writers organize their material. I have used Microsoft Word for years and years, and have become sort of a minor authority on Word. Before Word, I used WordPerfect, a word-processor that has largely gone out of use, and I had an almighty battle with Word to figure out how to use it. Every time I get a new program, I have to really struggle to get to use it effectively, only to learn it so well that it is once again a struggle to use a different program, as becomes inevitably necessary sooner or later.
To get started, let me say a little about WordPerfect. It was a perfectly good program for everything I wanted to do. Obviously, I used a lot of different
styles, starting with
italics and
boldface, and various
colors, and tables, and margins, and so on. If you don't want any of this,
you should just use an editor, like Notepad (or Emacs, which you've probably never heard of).
Small to Medium Documents: WordPerfect and MS Word
Let’s start with Italics. In WordPerfect, when you want Italics, you select a portion of text, and turn it on. Inside the program, it places a sort of invisible marker that says
Italics starts here, and then at the end of the selection, it puts another marker
stop italics here. In addition, WordPerfect had a split-screen mode, where you could actually see where these markers were. The screen looked like this:
The two tags in the lower screen that show where Italics start and stop are just there to help the user. I could delete either tag, and the whole Italics thing would go off, and the text would be plain once again.
Then I started using Word, because many computers I had to work on
only had Word, and I was frustrated because I did not know how to get rid of Italics precisely, because I could not
see the tags. In later years, Word made it possible to see these things, and my comfort level went up.
As my writing projects grew larger —and they grew
enormous— the WordPerfect implementation of a wordprocessor which
actually placed those invisible markers in the text, became too clumsy. If something went wrong, which it does most of the time, the program would go insane, looking for italics tags that had got accidentally deleted, without WordPerfect knowing about it. (Don’t ask.) Word, in contrast, flags every character as either italicized or not. It therefore doesn’t have to go looking for tags, which is a point in its favor. As WordPerfect got harder to find, and as all my friends started using Word, and because PowerPoint and Excel came along with Word, I decided to use Word, just about the time when Word started implementing “character”-type attributes, like Italics and Bold, and “paragraph”-type attributes, like margins and indents, which WordPerfect had done long before.
With Word, you can get your (short-to-medium-sized) document to print out almost exactly how you want it. Word is a good general-purpose word processor, especially if you take the time to learn all its features (and if Microsoft stops fooling with it every so often).
Large Documents: Scrivener
Once I started writing really large documents —or when my short documents became enormous documents while my back was turned— I had to resort to keeping them as entire folders of chapters, which were later combined into a single book. Word (and WordPerfect, for the record,) has a method of “linking in” subdocuments, to make a longer document, but somehow that doesn’t work as well as it should.
Enter
Scrivener.
Scrivener is more of a document
organizing program than a document
creating program, and furthermore, I haven't still learned how to use it well.
To give you a quick overview,
Scrivener looks like PowerPoint, where you see the list of slides down the left, and you usually see one slide on the rest of the screen. Lots of other programs are like this, for instance such things as PageMaker, or QuarkXpress, where you have immediate access to any portion of your project. There is a panel along the left (called the Binder) that contains lots of documents and folders. Each folder would normally be a
chapter, and inside each folder, you get a number of
scenes. This allows you to rearrange the scenes as you prefer (not trivial, but just needs careful dragging, really), just as you would rearrange slides in PowerPoint. In fact, there is a view very much like Slide Sorter View (that you get in PowerPoint) in
Scrivener in which you can just rearrange things pretty much by dragging things around.
If rearranging your scenes within a chapter is a central problem in managing a large writing project —and it is, for me— then
Scrivener will help you immensely.
You can even do your writing in
Scrivener. It has a rudimentary editor that can do most of what you want: Italics, Boldface, Colors, etc. However, once you apply a certain style to a piece of text,
Scrivener forgets that the block has that style, unlike Word. In Word, you can modify the style, and then all instances of that style will change throughout the document. In
Scrivener, you have to go back and change each instance —if you really want to.
You can put all sorts of text into
Scrivener, e.g. Word documents, RTF documents, plain text, HTML, Open Document format text, etc, etc. Getting text into
Scrivener is not hard, provided you don’t already have a structure in your document which you want to preserve. If you do, you have to work harder, and find out for yourself how that is done; I don’t want to set myself up as a
Scrivener authority, because I just don’t know enough. There is a website forum, where you join up, and ask all the questions you want from people who really know.
Compiling
Once you’re ready to take a look at your document, to print it, or read it through, or send it off to a publisher or anyone, you make a
single document out of it by Compiling. At this stage, you can get
Scrivener to make anything in the document —that it recognizes— look any way you want. You can tell it to make the Chapter Titles look like
so, and the paragraphs look like
so, and so on. I’m still trying to figure how to make an
excerpt from a letter look the way I want.
Scrivener can compile your project as an Ebook directly. It does a really good job of this. It can also compile to pdf format (to be read on Acrobat Reader). It can also compile your project into the form of a Word document! And, as a bonus, your styles will be a nice, minimal set, just the way Smashwords likes it. (Smashwords doesn’t like millions of different styles throughout your document; if they find too many styles, they ask you to fix your book. Consistency of style is one ingredient of a professional-looking piece of writing.)
The software you use really affects the outcome of what you produce to some degree, so I hope this blog post helps you choose the appropriate tool for your writing.
Kay
