Scrivener

Ongoing Scrivener Saga

So after many hours of struggling with my own lack of patience, I finally cracked the code and got my enormous work in progress into Scrivener. Seems that two things were working against me: 1. My laptop was trying to run the program in a compatibility mode with Windows 8, which -much like Windows Vista – was really pretty and about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. 2. Scrivener is a multi-faceted program that takes a file and manipulates it into several different formats, so when you have a HUGE file like the manuscript I was importing it’s going to take awhile.

By ‘awhile’ I mean ten minutes. I timed it. From clicking on ‘open’ in the import dialog box to the title page appearing on my screen it took ten solid minutes. The fact that I thought to time it is a completely different issue.

This is a good time for me to admit that I had an idea about what Scrivener would do, based on my use of the program for a screenplay several years ago. I had taken a manuscript then and used the formatting in Scrivener to set it up properly for a screenplay. I remembered simply cutting and pasting and poof! Screenplay!

First, I was missing a few steps in between the cut/paste and poof. So when I put my 143,000+ word manuscript into the Scrivener software I spent a few good long minutes looking for the POOF button. What I found instead was a fantastic tutorial that I watched and I did the steps along with it. The result was not a poof, but an almighty ‘oh, that’s how it works’ that was almost as satisfying as the poof I erroneously remembered.

Second, the keyboard shortcut to “split” the huge behemoth into smaller chunks (chapters) was an amazing find. When you have more than 50 chapters, finding anything that speeds up your work is a huge plus. It went on from there – the corkboard, the ability to move chapters around, the outline contained on index cards – and I am sold.

The only thing left is that I feel a bit like I am stepping out on Google Drive. I did find this wonderful article that explained how to sync up my Scrivener data with Drive so that I can work on more than one machine and have a backup that I trust. So I guess I’m not completely leaving Google Drive behind – it is still my weapon of choice for beta reading and editing. And the current work in progress was 3/4 written in Google Drive, but I’m going to work on it in Scrivener and see what the difference will look like. I’m also going to do April’s CampNanoWrimo in Scrivener so we will see how it goes starting from scratch.

The saga continues – just as I was getting excited about working on my novel from my phone. Stay tuned.

Crawling back out of the rabbit hole…

First, let me say that if that image there was my rabbit hole I would never come back out. Ever.

Right, so back to the topic at hand – rabbit holes. I am using this term not to describe an underground warren, but a distraction one encounters while trying to be productive. For me, social media is a big rabbit hole that I try to avoid while working on my current round of edits. But today I encountered an even bigger and deeper hole – Scrivener.

*Quick disclaimer: I am not in any way financially supported by Literature and Latte, the company that makes Scrivener. I also hold no grudge – if anything, I desperately want it to work because I feel like it would improve the quality of my work, if only it would behave itself and start working for me.*

I used Scrivener a few years ago after a Nanowrimo win that led to a discount on the software. I downloaded it and used it during a Script Frenzy – the Office of Letters and Light’s now-defunct scriptwriting month – and loved it, but never went back to it because, at the time, I wrote with Word. I still think about going back to that big white ‘W’ on the blue now and then, just because I used it for so long and understand how it works.

A beta reader and editor suggested that I write in Google Docs after working through edits in between Google and Word and finding Google to be easier. I was already saving my work in that cloud after losing half a manuscript to a bad hard drive, so it was not a huge leap to writing in GDocs. I write everything there now and love it. I even spent an hour today learning how to compare versions of documents! So when voices that I trust from the other rabbit hole, Twitter, suggested Scrivener, I decided to give it a try. After all, I have a 143k word document that needs to be divided into three novels so that I can see where I need to add more meat on the bones and I’m SO VERY TIRED of holding the button on the touchpad while it highlights half my manuscript.

So now I find myself in a new diversion – four hours of my life given to uninstalling and installing Scrivener, watching tutorials, waiting for the program to open (5 minutes) and to import a .doc (10 minutes, I wish I was kidding), and I just don’t see the point. The latest version of Windows mentioned in their help files is Windows 8, and I’m on 10. Maybe it was just not meant to be.

Sadly, I’m too stubborn for that and it’s back to the Scrivener Rabbit Hole for me. Ugh.