I’ve been using Scrivener now on Athena (my Macbook) for almost the full month of free use.

Is it worth the $40 to buy the full license?

Yes and No.

The Bad

$40 is a lot of money, especially in a year when I’ve already spent so much on my writing (Athena herself, for example).

There is nothing that Scrivener gives me which I cannot achieve through other methods.

The cost of Scrivener includes a whole host of tools that I did not use during the trial, and probably wouldn’t use even if I bought it.

Formatting for a manuscript and formatting for web posting is not really the same. I was able to remove the leading tabs from Scrivener, and thankfully it pastes into WordPress WITH the double line break that internet viewing requires, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to swap between the two formatting styles.

Bringing in existing documents is available, it is understandably imperfect. However fabulous it would have been for it to arrange Blue Moon into chapters when I imported my old manuscript, it was too much to expect and I knew it. I’ll have to pull each chapter out individually, and each scene besideswhich, in order to take advantage of the tools available from Scrivener.

The Good

That sounds a little depressing, with all the negatives I found lined up like that. The benefits of Scrivener should be equally persuasive.

I plan on mentioning the web formatting versus the manuscript formatting on the Scrivener forums to see if there is a workaround. The community of Scrivener users is quite close-knit and very helpful. Having that kind of background, with the writers and users all working together to create a tool, is pretty incredible and can mean that the tool itself isn’t likely to be abandoned by its creators.

Organization. Let me give you three examples of how I am currently organizing my large writing projects.

1) Choose

Choose installments are posted on the web. Each installment is its own post on the blog, and I have no backups aside from the ones I manually create, and wordpress backups have been somewhat unreliable for me in the past. I can only write Choose if I have access to the internet.

2) Blue Moon

My old Blue Moon manuscript is in a single word doc. I have about seven copies of it, and I’m not entirely sure which one is the most recent. Some are more formatted than others, and finding a particular scene involves a lot of scrolling and is just an incredible pita. Editing that monster takes more effort than it should.

3) Song of Binding

This is my collaborative novel, and it is currently in editing. It is dispersed through a large number of googledocs that we are desperately trying to keep organized through links in a wiki. Because of the rewrite, we have several copies of old chapters, and with the editing, we now have NEW copies of the chapters as well. Each chapter is stored in its own document, and each document must be found and opened individually if we wish to go back and remember what we’d written or reference something.

All three of those are sloppy. They get the job done, but they require a great deal of personal organization to keep straight.

Scrivener organizes without any of that fuss.

Blue Moon, in Scrivener, will be laid out by chapter, and each chapter separated by scene. The entirety can be searched easily, and opening a chapter is a single click. Navigation through the chapters is easy, and many viewing options are available, from split screen modes, to manuscript format reading, where all chapters are “squished” together and read as a single large document.

Each installment of Choose can be written as a “chapter” and then moved to the web after editing.

I can input all of my Warcraft fanfic into a single scrivener file. What color was Tyrsdae’s hair? How much of Vonya’s secret past have I revealed? Will Tayt ever steal that stupid pineapple? All of it in a single scrivener file, available together without me having to fish through a ton of individual documents.

Scrivener also holds more than just text – it also holds images, movies, audio clips. Find a photo of someone who looks like your character? Add it to Scrivener and pull it up any time you need to see it. Find a movie clip that perfectly captures the mood of your chapter? Add it to Scrivener.

I toyed around and added the old Choose installments to a scrivener file, and I also added a file down below for reference. Hair color, eye color, name spellings, a few notes about character pasts that I want to remember. That file is only a click away any time I write choose in Scrivener.

That’s a pretty powerful tool.

Importing OLD writing may be a pita, but writing new stuff in Scrivener is simple and straightforward.

And, if you happen to be writing a novel, exporting a scrivener file into a single, manuscript-formatted file is as easy as pushing a button (and then probably picking a place to save it…)

My Take

My opinion is that Scrivener is worth it for writers who are still writing new stuff, and who seek a way to organize their writing.

I think it’s worth it for me. I save so much writing time not bouncing back and forth between handwritten notes, typewritten notes that I saved somewhere or another, and trying to find where it was that I’d mentioned a specific country name and what I’d said about it.

I like it, and I think that the more I use it, the more likely I am going to depend upon it.

I wish I’d found it (and had a mac to use it on) years ago.