Software Review: Scrivener 1.0 (Mac OS X)

Kristen King

Scrivener 1.0 (Mac OS X)
by Keith Blount
Literature & Latte
$34.99 (30-day free trial)

reviewed by Melissa Barton

www.inkthinkerblog.com — Keeping research notes, outlines, and drafts of long documents organized in an ordinary word processor can be daunting and time-consuming for writers. Those who write and outline out of order or who have large amounts of research material to handle can be frustrated by flipping between multiple documents and keeping track of file versions. Since most of us aren’t programmers, we had to live with the limitations of word processors. Fortunately, Keith Blount had the same problem.

Blount designed Scrivener to organize his own writing, incorporating new features as suggested by users. Scrivener combines features of an outlining program and a word processor, with some other, less common functions. A basic tutorial comes with the program and gives an overview of most features. The program is very self-evident and easy to use, and the extensive help file is well written and clearly illustrated with screenshots.

Each Scrivener project collects documents, which can represent chapters, sections, and subsections, into a “draft.” The documents in the draft can be selected and rearranged via a menu on the left side of the screen. Below the draft is another menu for selected and organizing research. The main text viewer can be single or split to show different parts of the draft.

At the top of the screen are buttons for accessing the outliner (which is similar to OmniOutliner) and the corkboard, which shows virtual index cards corresponding to sections. These index cards have short summaries and can be easily rearranged. A notes field and color-coding for writing stage are attached to each section.

Although designed primarily with novelists and screenwriters in mind, Scrivener is also a good organizational tool for drafting nonfiction books, long academic papers, reports, and other complex documents. Since some typical word processor features, such as footnoting, are pretty bare bones or not supported, documents have to be exported to other programs for final formatting. The export process is straightforward and quick.

Scrivener won’t work for everyone’s creative process, and Blount suggests some alternatives for both Mac and Windows users. An earlier beta version of Scrivener, Scrivener Gold, is available for free, although it has fewer features than Scrivener 1.0. Scrivener is not available for Windows or earlier versions of Mac OS, but Blount plans to continue improving and updating the OS X version.

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Melissa Barton is a freelance science writer and editor based in Colorado. Her portfolio can be viewed online at http://www.rosettastones.net.

Although this article was published by Kristen King, the original author retains all copyright and should be contacted for reprint requests.