Insight Creative Tech

Scrivener Helps You Pull It All Together

Ever won­dered how in blazes you cap­ture, orga­nize and store all those ideas for blog posts so you always have access to them and can quickly find them and start writing?

And sec­on­dar­ily, but per­haps even more impor­tantly, do you pine for a pro­gram that works with you instead of fight­ing you every step of the way as you attempt the some­times hideously chal­leng­ing work of writ­ing use­ful and inter­est­ing blog posts?

These ques­tions have plagued me for many years.

In the begin­ning, and for a long time there­after, I strug­gled to man­age my ideas and my writ­ten words. I wrote ideas on scraps of paper, tried book­mark­ing links on Deli­cious to jog my mem­ory and save ref­er­ence mate­r­ial for later, cre­ated mul­ti­ple text doc­u­ments in TextE­dit and stored these in fold­ers, emailed myself ideas and par­tial drafts, and tried many far more arcane and use­less meth­ods to man­age my writ­ten words.

Of course some might (some­what right­fully) sug­gest that all this effort to find a way to write was just a man­i­fes­ta­tion of Resis­tance, but that’s a post for another day.

Through­out it all though, when it came time to actu­ally bang out a post, I had a devil of a time find­ing all the var­i­ous bits of dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal mnemonic rub­bish I had cre­ated and set to whirling metaphor­i­cally and lit­er­ally all around my life. In other words, I was frus­trated before I even sat down to write because I knew it would be a royal pain to gather my wits and bits. And since it was frus­trat­ing, I would rarely end up writ­ing at all.

6 Things I Had to Have

So to recap, my writ­ing frus­tra­tions led me to want:

1. Some­where to save ideas so that I could eas­ily find and cat­e­go­rize them
2. Easy and smart man­age­ment of drafts and revisions
3. A way to quickly see my word count with­out undue effort
4. Great tools—better stuff than the basics in Word­Press or TextE­dit (the equiv­a­lent of Notepad for Win­dows users) but a sim­ple and easy interface
5. Relief from the frus­tra­tion and pain with the Word­Press com­po­si­tion screen
6. Hav­ing every­thing syn­chro­nize over the net­work so I could write online or offline and on whichever device I hap­pened to be using at the moment

Enter Scrivener, the Answer to Every Sane Blogger’s Dreams

A cou­ple years ago I found Scrivener and played with it and thought it was won­der­ful. But at the time I was blinded by other tools and just didn’t think of Scrivener as a blog­ging tool. My loss. About 6 months ago I re-discovered it and I can tell you that not only did it address all 6 of the afore­men­tioned desires, it went way beyond that and taught me to be a more orga­nized writer to boot.

Now I also use Scrivener to:

1. Store PDFs, pic­tures links and sites in my research bin
2. High­light key­words in my post so I can see SEO issues quickly
3. Speak my text back to me—I love this! (yes you can do this in the OS X sys­tem, but this is also inte­grated so no need to run out­side the app.)
4. Sync with Drop­Box so yes, even though there isn’t a Scrivener app for iPad, you can use Sim­pleNote and Drop­Box and eas­ily sync your work between your iPad and your desk­top or note­book computer.

Why Writ­ing Inside Word­Press Sucks

Some blog­gers have sug­gested that you should just save drafts on your server in Word­Press and write inside the com­po­si­tion screen in Word­Press. But hon­estly, that sucks for 2 rea­sons that I can think of now, and prob­a­bly more rea­sons I’ll think of later.

1. I have def­i­nitely had a browser lock up, or a server hic­cup on ‘Save’ and lost all my work more than once.
2. (As if 1 weren’t rea­son enough not to write in Word­Press!) I can’t FIND any­thing quickly and eas­ily when I’m look­ing for it.
3. And 3 (oh look, I thought of another one!) I can’t stand writ­ing in that lit­tle window—I’m for­ever drag­ging the right-hand cor­ner down­ward and try­ing to move it around so that the line that I’m actu­ally typ­ing is right in front of me, etc.
4. And another thing—I have to flip around among my book­marks site, my text doc­u­ment filled with reminders, and more things I can’t remem­ber at the moment while edit­ing and writing.

The Pièce de Résistance

When you’re writ­ing in Scrivener, you can set it to full screen and then sud­denly, won­der­fully, mas­ter­fully you are pre­sented with a lay­out with type that is the size you’ve set, a dark­ened back­ground to elim­i­nate dis­trac­tion and, the pièce de résis­tance, a con­stantly ris­ing text line that stays at the same level as you type so you never have to scroll the page as you con­tinue to fill the screen with bril­liant tap­pity taps!

Here’s the thing—Scrivener is a mar­velous piece of soft­ware and what’s neat is that even though it appeals to a crazy-wide vari­ety of humans doing superbly dis­parate types of writ­ing, it doesn’t feel kitchen-sinky or Microsoft-Wordy in the least. In fact the tools stay out of your way and let you get to the busi­ness at hand (by which I mean writ­ing in case you were think­ing mar­malade sift­ing or tar­mac shaving).

Note that the lat­est ver­sion of Scrivener was recently released (ver­sion 2.0) and I’m even more pleased with it as I con­tinue to learn its new fea­tures. Also, this pro­gram has tra­di­tion­ally been avail­able on the Mac­in­tosh only, but they’ve recently released a shiny new beta for Win­dows and that will soon be a wel­come option.

There are so many other fea­tures I haven’t even touched upon, but I fig­ure if you’re even remotely curi­ous, you can find out a lot more about Scrivener on the web­site.

I wrote this because I thought it was impor­tant to fea­ture Scrivener as a blog­ging tool and get the atten­tion of blog­gers who might have over­looked it. Truly, if you’re blog­ging and not using Scrivener, you may well be cav­ing in to Resis­tance more often than you know.