I realize the title of this post makes little sense, but it is true. Or, maybe I’m just fooling myself. 😉 Either way, I have made, I think – hopefully, some headway on the writing software obsession in the last few days. As you might recall, I tried Liquid Story Binder, and it worked well. Got everything lined out, then realized that I just didn’t care for the feel or appearance of it. Scratch that. Then I moved on to a few more, like WriteItNow (which was buggy), and Final Draft 9 (which was great, but it was like trying to turn a monster RV into a mini-van).

At my wits ends, I went back and tried Scrivener, even though it seemed buggy right out of the box, and I had already tried it awhile back to no avail. But, I was desperate. So, I loaded it up and took it for a test run.

I’m thankful I did.

What a breath of fresh air. When I write, I am a plotter/planner. None of this pantzy stuff for me. I adapted the snowflake method when writing the rough draft of Sacred the Circle, and, once I get the full summary, I break it down into individual scenes. With Scrivener, I can do this in the binder, annotate the each scene’s card while I go. I can work on the fly, moving, adding, deleting scenes, until I flush out my story.

Once I have a nice framework, then I’ll go back and work with each card in split screen, binder on the left, editor in the middle, inspector on the right. I then write an action sequence breakdown for each scene, all the major bullet points of what happens to the plot.

After this is done for every scene, I copy the “summary” and put it in an Archive folder, under research (I don’t like Scrivener’s Snapshots). With a duplicate copy of the summary, I can then go back and, with note cards and action sequence breakdown sheets for each scene, write the rough draft of my novel in fullscreen mode.

I very much utilize the whole project target, as well as setting individual targets for each scene, so I no longer have to worry about coming up short on novel length. I don’t think I will use the session target nearly as much, maybe for actual writing, but I doubt it. It subtracts from your total what you delete and that isn’t what I want. But, I love the right click selection word count. That is extremely handy, and I can find what I’ve edited or written by just selecting the section and right clicking.

I don’t know if I will actually use the cork board all that much, if at all. I prefer using the binder, because I can see the whole story, from first scene to last. And, with the inspector having so many options, it makes the cork board rather useless.

I should be getting back on the horse here soon. I don’t want to say today, and then blow it. But, there really is no reason why I shouldn’t.