One of my major goals is to write a full-length novel. I’ve made small inroads into this over the last year, using Apple’s Pages for the word processing and a copious amount of handwritten notes in my Moleskine notebook and numerous scrawled pages all piled together in a plastic folder.
It’s a nightmare to manage. Writing a novel means dealing with a gargantuan amount of text and having to organize that can be tough.
That’s when I discovered Scrivener – a popular Mac-only application that allows aspiring (and accomplished) writers the ability to organize their writing efficiently.
The heart of Scrivener is its Binder; this allows you to work on small pieces of text that make up the entire novel (i.e. chapters or parts), and through an intuitive interface allows you to move sections around. It has an iPhoto-like corkboard for arranging summaries of chapters, and cool features like the Project Targets allow writers to set word-count goals that can be achievable in writing sessions. This allows for a more productive time and ensures that a novel or other piece of text gets finished on-time.
The built-in efficient filing system provided by the Binder allows one to organize Research notes by simply dragging and dropping web pages, PDFs and a myriad number of other file formats into the folder. Very neat.
There’s a whole load of features that Scrivener has, and a version 2.0 is on its way for the Mac in October, just in time for NaNoWriMo – the National November Writing Month, an online competition that encourages aspiring writers to write a novel of 50 000 words during the month of November. Having Scrivener as part of your writer’s toolkit will surly mean you’re one step closer to achieving that difficult goal.
But Scrivener has only been available for Mac OS X in the past six years since its release. And now, finally, the developers, Literature & Latte (cool name, eh?) have announced this week the imminent release of Scrivener for Windows (click link to see videos of the new app).
Scrivener for Windows is set to release in early 2011, and a beta programme will begin in around October. According to the developers, Mac users needn’t worry that they’re being sidelined with this announcement; the Windows version is being developed by a second team in Australia led by writer and developer Lee Powell. Also, the Windows version will be playing catch-up to Scrivener for Mac, and will include all the features of v1.0 of Scrivener for Mac, plus the user interface improvements of v2.0, but will not include any of the new features coming to Scrivener for Mac 2.0.
This is exciting news for writers everywhere – especially aspiring novelists – as, in my opinion, Scrivener is one of the best-written apps out there at the moment. And it is extremely affordable too, given its immense feature set: only $45.
