Scrivener was a game changer for my writing process. Before, I confined my stories to word processing programs like Word or Pages, which became a struggle when I clocked over a hundred thousand words in a single document. Scrivener puts everything into one place. Moving a scene is a simple drag and drop. It contains all my research notes, plus, it’s a company with its roots in Cornwall, so I’m using local, pasty driven technology.
Here’s a list of my favourite tools:
Snapshot
From the Inspector Panel, click on the Camera icon. The + icon will save a separate version of the document which you can refer to. Here you can compare different versions of the document and roll back to a previous version if necessary. Snapshot is great for when I’m doing big scene rewrites.
Linguistic Focus
Edit – Writing Tools – Linguistic Focus
This tool highlights specific word types from a selection of direct speech, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. I find this useful when I purely want to focus on character conversations or when I need to weed out unnecessary adverbs from my writing.
Name Generator
Edit – Writing Tools – Name Generator
Stuck for a name? This tool will randomly create a selection of names for you to choose from. The only downside is it is fairly limited, but to combat this, you can add your own name lists.
Label
Found in the footer of the Inspector Panel.
As I write from multiple points of view, I like to use these colour coded labels to highlight which character point of view each scene is in. From the View menu, you can select where you want the label colour to show.
Typewriter Scrolling
View – Text Editing – Typewriter Scrolling
This keeps your text central in the document and it is a nice, handy feature so you don’t have to keep scrolling back up again.
Matching Text
Inspector Panel – Bookmark – Matching Text
This will list all documents that share a paragraph or sentence with the current document. Useful in spotting any duplicated text you may have used elsewhere and highlighting if your characters parrot the same phrases too often.
What are your favourite tools on Scrivener? If you haven’t tried it, check out the free trial on their website.
This is cool. Linguistic focus. That’s exactly what I’ll be doing next week. With an eye to trimming so eliminating adverbs, as one technique, will be handy.