Rebecca Henderson

Simply put, Scrivener is my favorite application on my MacBook.

I have a distinct memory of sitting in the Mountain Cafe in Yunnan in 2009, some time during what passes for fall in the tropics, telling a couple of friends that I needed something software-ish to organize my research and writing. I was in the deepest throes of research for what has turned into my first novel, and if I wasn’t careful, my notes were about to become too chaotic. Both of my desktops — on my Mac and in my office —  were covered with scraps of paper, sticky notes, and files with snippets of info. It was an avalanche waiting to happen.

“If only I could find something where I could have these little notecards on my computer, you know, and I could move them around and arrange them as I go further into the project — something that would let me get rid of my actual 3×5 cards,” I told my friends.

Shortly afterwards, I stumbled across Scrivener on the downloads page on Apple’s site and soon knew that I had found the program I had described to my friends, except even better.

I’ve been using Scrivener for almost two years now, and I’ve come darn close to working in it every day of those two years. It’s just that wonderful and useful.

“Why?” you may ask. Well, here’s why.

* It was love at first sight for me and Scrivener because of the corkboard view mode. Scrivener lets me make notecards with a brief synopsis and arrange them on a corkboard with cute little pushpins and customizable background colors. I keep mine looking like lined white 3x5s, a traditionalist, I suppose. You can also mark the notecards with stamps that tell you the status of that part of your project.

* Soon, I got over my infatuation with Scrivener’s looks and realized that it’s super useful for organization beyond simple arrangement of my ideas in a certain order on a corkboard. I can click on each of those synopsis cards and go to a full document. The documents can be arranged in folders and the folders in a project binder that’s divided into sections for my research and for my draft. Way more levels of organization than I ever dreamed of. And I use them all.

* So, now that I had Scrivener up and running, what was I supposed to do with all my notes in Word docs? Import them! Super easy. Equally as easy to export when I want to go the other direction, too, and with several handy options for how I want the imports and exports divided or combined.

* Even cooler than importing from Word, though, is the fact that I can import web pages. I used the web page import feature a bunch when I was doing research about the persecution of the Chin people in Burma. I was reading through page after page of reports on human rights violations, and rather than going back and forth from my web browser to Scrivener to take notes, I could import the web page as a file and stay in Scrivener to take notes on a split screen.

* Same with photos — I can import photos onto those cute little notecards and arrange and rearrange to my heart’s content. I did this with scanned photos of Lydia’s family during research for my novel, and I’m doing it again with the photos for my West Texas project.

* But the biggest time saver for me has been Scrivener’s ability to import audio files. I recorded dozens of hours of interviews with Lydia and was then able to import the audio into Scrivener and transcribe my notes without having to leave Scrivener. Before, when I had ethnographic interviews that I needed to transcribe or translate, I would listen to the file in iTunes or on my iPod while I typed, which is a huge pain. Every few seconds I would have to take my hands away from the keyboard to click the pause button in iTunes or mess with my iPod. But Scrivener has a function that allows me to start and stop audio files with a keystroke, so that I can keep typing fluidly without taking my hands off the keyboard. So very, very awesome. Seriously, I would have gone crazy trying to do all those hours of transcription without it.

* There are tons of other features that I hardly ever use, mostly because I haven’t taken the time to learn them well. Notes and meta-data and keywords and comment tracking and referencing and footnotes that export nicely into Word. Scrivener is just a delight for writerly people who have large projects to manage. I have several binders going at any given time — including one for this blog, as I mentioned a few weeks back.

When I wrote that post about how I blog, I intended to follow up in further detail about why I love Scrivener. Since that time, I learned that I could become an affiliate seller of Scrivener through my website. So if you’re interested in trying out this super handy tool, whether it’s for class notes or writing projects or whatever, I’d love it if you would use my referral. Thanks!

 Buy Scrivener 2.x for Mac OS X (Regular Licence)