Scrivener opens your eyes to what’s inside your book.
The greatest challenge in writing a book is seeing what needs to be inside. There are considerations around novels and their stories, but nonfiction books have other needs. Writing about subjects like how to engineer sales, or what goes into the hopes for sustainable life, demands a table of contents which will be complete and concise.
Memoirs even have their own vision demands. Memoirs are a kind of nonfiction that need a novelist’s voice and techniques. They also work best when they operate in a defined space of time. Following the trail of story events within a compressed part of a life is easier done with the right intentions and a great tool.
Scrivener is probably the best-loved tool that’s least understood by non-users. Some people don’t use Microsoft Word, but at least they grasp the ideas behind what we once called a word processor. Authors who have tried to use Scrivener and gave up sometimes aren’t sure what they can get out of the software.
I was working with an author whose second book covers a six-year stretch of her life as an advocate. She’s been doing the good hard work of drafting and revising parts of her safety memoir. We were facing more than three dozen portions of the book, looking for a pattern that would embrace all of the story. We had a bullet-point list of the main topics, what we’d call parts (with a number) in a book.
The Scrivener binder became our friend as we looked at the book together. We had all the latest chapters and segments dragged in from her thumb drive. Scrivener let us compare versions, look for overlaps in writing, examining the transitions from one section to another. It’s all offered in this essential tool. You can create a nonfiction book without Scrivener, of course. One of my authors won the Writers Digest Book Award for Nonfiction for her book this year without using Scrivener — although I tracked and edited the work with my own copy of her manuscript.
Each entry in that binder’s lineup contains an index-card-sized summary, so we can see at a glace where the story is heading and what is missing. You might not want to use Scrivener, but your book will be better for the vision that it provides.
It’s a simple five-step process to give Scrivener powers to your chapters your created in Word. You start by creating a blank project. You name that document in the binder, then drag your writing files from Word into that document. Now you can compare chapters and passages side by side, move parts around within the book—even search for a phrase and see where you’ve used it. The searching and finding is magic, powered by a database inside Scrivener you never need to know about.
And when you need to draft a passage or a chapter to fill in a gap, you can either use Word, or use Scrivener. I still work with both tools to write, but after awhile it’s simpler and faster to pour out the creativity into the same place where I’m tracking and editing it. If I need to take the writing back out into Word, I can do that easily, too.
What’s great about using the tools together is that when you get your editor’s notes in a Word document, they show up automatically in Scrivener. Sometimes revisions demand that you move things around, or toss them out. Scrivener gives you (or your editor) a safe and easy to find place to put the discards. Back in the day, I’d create a Word file called For Later and just paste away.
Books come together over a long time. Tracking their pieces becomes the work of your editor. When you are your own editor, you’ll want something better than file folders or folders on your computer desktop. Writers who work with me get Scrivener’s powers included. We can also explore the software together during the project, so you’ll take away tool skills for your own use in solo work.
