Scrivener is probably the best software out there for writers and authors. Here are some of the reasons you should use Scrivener for all of your writing jobs. I use it to write my non fiction books ans well as for my novels.

1. Scrivener The best Software for Writers
mac20q.com /2015/03/scrivener-the-best-software-for-writers/
David Allen
Getting started with Scrivener
On Mac 20 questions the website many times I have talked about how I love to use
Scrivener. In the Mac 20 Questions podcast I interviewed the main developer of the
application Keith Blount. I’ve written many thousands of words within the application
for my blogs and I have a lot of words in Scrivener projects for books. What is
completely baffling to me at the moment, is how come I haven’t done some sort of
tutorial about Scrivener. How come I haven’t created a really long post going into
details about the application, commenting on all of the excellent features for writers.
Scrivener is quite easy to use, in-as-much as it’s so intuitive. On account of the
application being so competent with many excellent features, it does need some
explaining for all of the things you can do with it. Let’s start with a comparison with
MS Word and an overview of Scrivener and then get into some details.
Scrivener versus Microsoft Word
The Microsoft Word application is a huge monster of a word processor and has been
developed and designed for use within offices and business. Word has its good
points, but it is also true to say that it has become bloated over the years. You can
write novels within the application and many people do. It isn’t the best tool for the
job though. All of the marvellous things you can do with it to create great looking
documents are not really helpful for the specific task of writing a novel or even for a

2. non-fiction work of book length.
Twelve of the Best Reasons to get Scrivener
One of the things about using Microsoft Word is that when people are using it, they
are tempted to mess about with the formatting and the look of the document. Rather
than actually getting the writing completed. Writers will mess about with the font size,
headings and anything to do with how the document is going to look when it is finally
set to whatever output. When you’re using Scrivener you just set the look of the
document as you are writing so that it is easy to read. Forget about how the
document will be when it is finally finished until it is time to compile. There is even a
distraction free mode which clears everything else away from the screen apart from
the window you’re writing in. The controls for that mode slide away from the screen to
be hidden, so you can concentrate just on your writing.
There is a movement to use distraction free writing applications and to use
markdown syntax for writing. I think this is a very good idea and I like to use
applications such as Byword. These applications give you limited scope for twiddling
and fiddling and make you concentrate on getting the words out of your head and
onto the page. This is a great way to go and could be a step along the way towards
your larger document, especially if you are doing part of the work on your iPad. You
could write 1000 words in Byword on your iPad and using iCloud those words will be
transferred so that they are immediately available when you open up Byword on your
Mac. For those longer documents which could be a very long blog post, a short story,
a novella or a complete novel, this is where you need to start using Scrivener.
Scrivener is your funnel into which you put all of your various bits of writing and you
organise it so that it makes sense. It really depends upon what sort of writer you are
and what sort of workflow you like to use. You can write directly into Scrivener and
you can use it as a one-stop shop for your writing.

3. Scrivener was designed specifically for the writer and author. The reason for it being
created and developed was that the developer was looking for a tool, an application
that would scratch his own itch. Many of the best applications available have started
like this. Scrivener was designed by an author to be used by authors. So what does it
have, that makes it so good?
The way I use Scrivener
I am a user of DragonDictate, this is the
speech to text software that turns my words
into text on the page. I use this application
because I can write so much quicker and I
don’t have too touch the keyboard. After two or
three years of using the application I have
found that it works better if I dictate into a
DragonDictate window. There are some
applications I can dictate into and it works quite
well and then others it’s okay to start with and after a while it becomes less accurate.
So this is why I do my writing in a different application from Scrivener and then copy
and paste it after the first dictated draft. Occasionally I will dictate directly into
Scrivener for shorter pieces of writing. I can usually get away with it for three or four
paragraphs.
If I have written something that is may be a couple of thousand words long I can put
it into one text section in Scrivener and split it up afterwards. I can split it up using
keyboard shortcuts or by choosing menu items, I usually prefer to place my cursor
where I want to make the split do the equivalent of a right click on the Magic
Trackpad and choose the context sensitive command of Split at Selection.
Sometimes if I have headings within the text I will select the heading and use the
command of Split with Selection As Title. At this stage I can do any rearranging of the
order of the sections of text in the outliner.
I tend to do most of my outlining in the binder and I have added the icons in the
menubar to make it easy to move part of the document up or down in the order. I
also have the icons in there so I can make one or more sections I have selected to
be child documents of another. An example of that would be where you have the
scenes being child documents of a chapter.
Outlining in Outliner View

4. I sometimes use the keyboard
When I am doing the editing of the text in Scrivener I usually do that mostly using the
keyboard. Mostly this is to make changes of the grammar with the addition of
punctuation etc. I might be adding some words or maybe a whole sentence here or
there. I also use the application Hemingway to analyse the text for readability. I will
cut and copy out and paste back in when finished that stage of the editing. I work on
one section of the text at a time and when I have finished that part of the editing are
usually change the icon in the binder so I know which ones I have edited. I can also
do that in the information part of a window on the right-hand side as there is a section
in there for specifying the status. So I could change the status from being first draft to
edited.
Writing to a
target number
of words
A tool I like to use is
the project target
tool. I can decide
how many words I
would like to have in
a project and within
those settings I can
set a date for when
the project is to be
finished. I can set
which days I expect
to work on the project
which is usually
going to be Monday
to Friday. Scrivener will then show me in a pop-up dialogue box the word count for
the whole project and the target for the day. The target for the day is variable
depending upon how many words have been written to the point you have got to so

5. far. An example of this would be for the NaNoWriMo so you would set your project
target to 50,000 words. If you expect to
write for each day of the 30 days of
November your daily word count will be
1666. If on the first day you write 3000
words when you look at the target for the
next day it will be something less than
1666. Same thing if you have a day off,
the next day your daily word count will be
higher.
Being organised and using the
synopsis
The synopsis for a section of text which you can see in the corkboard view on the
cards, in the outline view and also in the information area is a useful tool when you
are being organised. Being organised and planning your work is one way to be more
productive and effective with your writing. If you are a professional writer I think it is
probably inevitable that you will do some outlining even if you do like to write by the
seat of your pants. With the zombie novel I am writing at the moment I started that off
by writing the first couple of chapters just by free writing. I had the ideas in my head
and they needed to be captured and turned into text as quickly as possible. So I just
let the words flow to be the starting point for the project. I could possibly move onto
the next chapters not knowing what’s going to happen and the story could have a life
of its own. The trouble with this sort of writing is that you could end up wasting a lot
of time by writing yourself into a dead-end. My plan is to plot the rest of the story out
and start by writing a synopsis of the end of the book. There could be the last chapter
or it could be the last couple of chapters. I want to know how it finishes. The best
place to do that is going to be in Scrivener and I could do that in the Cork board by
creating a card and make a little outline of what I expect to happen in that final
chapter. The next thing to do will be to create cards for the basic three act structure
and to start adding chapters to cover the various plot points. The general idea will be
to make things as bad as they can be during the first act and then make things even
worse for the second act. My notes in the synopsis can cover how I expect the
mindset of the protagonists to change after what I have put him through. I can have
notes about how I expect the seemingly unsolvable problems to get sorted out in
order to bring the novel to a conclusion in the final chapters.

6. During this process I would highly recommend using the Good And Geeky Writers
Workflow and to make use of mind mapping applications such as iThoughts on the
iPad and iThoughtsX on the Mac. This is a great way to gather ideas together and to
let the brain working away that it works best. Use all of the ideas from your mind map
to populate the synopsis for each of the chapters in your book.
Twelve of the Best Reasons to get Scrivener
The next stage of the process
The key to creativity is a combination of using organisation and planning and
allowing for flexibility and just going with the flow. So followed by some organising we
allowed ourselves to have some free writing freedom. Then what happens, is that
you get all excited about one of the ideas you have written down as a synopsis for a
part of your story. What else can you do but to jump right in there and turn those
fantastic ideas into words and stories. I think it is this combination of being organised
and going with the flow that is the perfect storm of creativity.
The Birds Eye view is art – The nitty-gritty is a to-do list

7. When you look at a book as a whole can’t help but think
that is the epitome of art. When it comes down to it arts
and creativity is nothing more than a series of
decisions. The ability to make those decisions is an art
whether it is good art depends upon the quality of the
decisions. I believe it is true to say that making a
decision to love the way a happy accident turned out
and to develop it, is just another one of those creative
decisions we make along the way. Writer said to make
recently that he thought having software designed
specifically for writers was a creativity killer. This same
writer is using Microsoft Word to do his writing. I’d be
the opinion that using software more suited to creating
business documents and less suitable for creative work
would be more of a creativity killer. I love the way that I
can use Scrivener in a number of different ways and all
of the options are available because that’s the way
writers work.
A view of your world – The writers world
There will be times when you’re working on your project
and you want to see all of it as a whole. You can do this
with Scrivener. So instead of looking at just one of the
sections of text or all of what you have in on chapter,
you can see the whole thing. Maybe you want to see
section of text that are not next to each other in the
binder, that works too. That would be cool if you have
made a collection of all the parts that have mention of
one of your characters. You can go through it to make sure the character is properly
represented in each part. You can make sure the character has the right description
in all scenes. Save the search in case you want to get back to it later. You could
decide you want to make the character look string and more vital in the story. In the
collection you’ve saved you can read through it all and make the necessary changes.
Collections in Scrivener is a handy tool to keep track of some things in your writing.
Synchronise with apps on mobile devices
It is not something I do often but you can sync up between Scrivener and a few

8. different mobile applications. I prefer to leave what I have in Scrivener alone and
feed more text into it from where ever I have created it, such as in Simplenote or
Index Card. Daedalus is an interesting text editor and also works with Scrivener. You
can Synchronise with a folder with Scrivener and if that is a folder one of your mobile
apps works with you can move between Mac and iOS with relative ease.
Synchronisation is not an easy thing though and you alway have to be careful that
you don’t overwrite something. This could happen if you leave something open and
unsaved/synchronised on either side and start working on the project on the other
side. The system won’t know which one should be the one to keep.
To be honest I am not keen on the sync out of Scrivener text. I much prefer to have
text being funnelled into it from Byword or Drafts on iOS. I have tried out these sync
options and of them I prefer syncing to Index Card app.
Twelve of the Best Reasons to get Scrivener