Just a Note before I begin. Sorry about the last two days of having no original posts, just the news posts. My Explanations is Press of business.
For me writing is a passion and a pastime. This was my roleplaying even before the games were invented. When you start writing about other places and people there comes a time when you want to be published. When you do this you need to work your manuscript into an acceptable format. For me I just inserted a piece of paper into the type writer and start pounding away. With computers this work flow has changed quite a bit. After the break How to Use Scrivener to write your book.
Scrivener is a Macintosh program about the process of writing including getting the word into a proper format for the publishers. My old style used a lot of paper, but I usually did not know where I was going and there were a lot of plot deviations I never intended. So, the first thing that writing a book with Scrivener is about is organization.
The manuscript in scrivener is divided into two pieces. the first piece are the folders inside of the manuscript folder. These folders are chapters. These chapters can have synopsis associated with them. In other words you can write down the goal of this chapter. You can see the chapter folders either in outline view or in corkboard view. The corkboard view presents the chapter title and the synopsis as an index card. The outline view also shows the chapter folder and synopsis, but it also includes certain tagging fields.
Inside of each chapter folder you can insert text files which I call scenes. Most of my chapters play out as a montage of scenes. Each of the scenes can be placed in it’s own rtf file. You can also get a corkboard or outline view of the scenes of each chapter, chapter by chapter.
The really cool thing about the corkboard is that you can move the index cards on the corkboard and it will be moved in the manuscript. This could be a chore in the word processors. Here it is very easy.
Once you have you rmanuscript you can compile it and print it out, or export it as a Word document. These tools make writing easy. You still have to do the writing.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Very informative! I added a link to this information for all the fan-writers out there.
Thank you, Suzanna
I concur. It’s an almost indispensable program for me as I write my first foray into fiction.
After a few months of tinkering and now several weeks of using the program on a daily basis, I wonder how I could have done it before the old way. The “old way” being with lots of open notepad files, word documents, and those little scraps of paper every writer seems to breed like fleas in their desks and pockets, arranged like shrapnel around the computer. It was easy to not only lose bits of work, but to waste hours that I could and should have been writing, spent instead on cleaning up folders and endless attempts organizing all the diverse pieces.
Of course, the key still lies in the prose that comes out of your own hard graft, but it would be all that much harder without having things on the organizational front be so close to your fingers.
A simply great program for any serious would-be writer.
Eric
I like tools that give you options but don’t Force you to “do it their way.” Scrivener is like that.
Thanks, Eric for the comments. Do good work