Short and sweet (hopefully) report on my adventures with Scrivener.

First, a note about how I write – I normally do a quick outline, and then think up a structure.
For instance – in the stories I’m writing right now (two 10.000 words pieces) I’m trying to follow the Seven Points Structure I mentioned in a post a while back.

Now, in an ideal world, I could lay back and let the story develop in my mind while I listen to music and browse illustrated books, so that when everything’s fleshed out, I can just go through a long bout of writing, and do a first draft in a few days.
But time is tight – so I basically go and write.

I start writing the first scene, and I go on until I get stuck.
At this point I drop the first scene and move on to the second, and I go on until I’m stuck again.
Which means I can move to the third scene… etcetera.

After a break – say, lunch, or sleep, or anything else – I go through every scene I did on the previous writing session, straightening the continuity: it does not take long, and when I’m finished, I can start on the new scene, and go on.

I know this is not enormously efficient – but it’s fast, it works for me, and it allows me to put together a viable first draft rather swiftly.

I used to do this with numbered txt files – storytitle1.txt, storytitle2.txt, etc.
Scrivener helps because I can manage each scene separately in the same project – and I can see the whole structure on a corkboard, move scenes around etc.
This increases my efficiency, and helps checking for errors (like calling a character Lou in the first scene and the Leo in all the others) and has the extraordinary bonus of allowing me to rearrange the structure without renaming the txt files.
Nice and smooth.

So everything’s perfect?
Well, no.
The Linux Beta Version of Scrivener does not allow me to compile all the scenes in a single file – a function that would be most useful.

And yet, while the bug is unpleasant, my overall opinion of Scrivener remains very high – it works for me, and it helps my writing.
And that was the idea from the start, right?

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