The Fountain Pen Blog

This is part 3 of my review of Scrivener. You can read part 1 here, and you can read part 2 here.

It’s taken me a while to finish these, but it’s time to (finally) wrap up this review. There are two more features I want to briefly highlight that really set Scrivener apart for me.

First, the ability to take “snapshots” of your story is a very helpful feature that I can definitely see myself using when I go back to revise. Sometimes during revision, you decide to make a huge change that affects large portions of your manuscript. Maybe you eliminate a character, or add a new scene that changes later events, requiring you to go through and change multiple scenes to reflect your revision. When I was revising big things like this in the past using Microsoft Word, I would often create a new Word document to save the original in case at any point I wanted to go back to the way things had been before I made all those changes. In Microsoft Word, you would have to copy and paste the entire story into a new document to save it as a backup for this purpose. Knowing that, I was happy to discover that Scrivener has a built-in feature called snapshots that allows you to do that within the program, saving an older version in case you decide to go back to it. This wasn’t something that couldn’t be done at all with Microsoft Word, but once again, the fact that Scrivener’s creators thought of this tells me that they know writers end up doing this a lot, and it’s much easier to keep track of things like this when they’re all in the same program.

Second, an issue with writing using Microsoft Word is that it is not always easy to look at more than one thing while typing. This is especially useful when trying to quote something or look up a fact from a source to double check your accuracy. Sure, you can shrink the document down and put it side by side with something else, but to do that you have to open that second file, shrink both of them down, and play around with the shape of the windows and the zoom on the documents to get them to fit on your screen. It’s not impossible, but it is a bit tedious and time consuming. Of course, a second computer monitor solves that problem, but I don’t have two monitors, just a laptop. Scrivener lets you view two selections from within Scrivener with just a few clicks, with the option of splitting the text viewer vertically or horizontally–whichever works best for you. I found myself using this feature literally all the time. It’s even useful for writing a particularly long scene. If I want to look back at the beginning of a scene while I’m writing the end of it, I can split the viewer and scroll one side to the part I want to review, viewing different parts of the same scene at the same time. I’d need two copies of the same document to do that in Microsoft Word, and it would take way more steps to get both items on the screen.

There are still plenty of Scrivener features I haven’t really used much, like the keywords feature I mentioned in a previous post, or the comments and footnotes feature. As a result, I’m not really sure how useful they are. Maybe they’re game changers for some people, or just extraneous for others. Now that I’ve completely made the switch to composing all my longer projects on Scrivener, I suspect I’ll end up trying them eventually.

In an earlier post (which can be read here) when I said I’d be doing this review, I promised to talk about usefulness and then give my final impression. So how useful is Scrivener? To me, it’s been extremely useful, but I’d clarify that it’s really not necessary for especially short projects. I don’t see myself writing flash fiction or individual poems that are meant to stand on their own using Scrivener, so if that’s primarily what you do, it might not be worth the money since Microsoft Word is totally fine for those tasks. However, as soon as you embark on a longer project, or one involving a great deal of supplemental materials like research and character sketches, Scrivener becomes extremely valuable. If you tend to write novellas, novels, plays, or essays, I highly recommend it. You don’t have to commit to it right away either. You can give the free trial a go before you make a decision to spend any money on it. It lasts for 30 days of actual use, so if you tend to write sporadically or if you download it and forget about it for six months, you can still give it a try for a fair amount of time before making a decision.

My final impression of Scrivener is that it’s an extremely valuable tool. While it’s not a necessity for writing any more than a computer or a typewriter is (plenty of brilliant works have been written with just a pen and paper), I highly recommend it for longer works, especially if you expect to keep track of many different supplemental materials as you write. It helped me keep track of an enormous cast of characters during NaNoWriMo, and as someone who tends to write shorter works (short fiction and poetry), the many organizational features Scrivener has made the task of taking on something longer much less daunting.

Have you used Scrivener? What was your experience with it? Have you tried any other writing software? Feel free to leave a comment below!