As I have mentioned on this blog and on The Ardent Scribe, Scrivener has proven to be a wonderful tool for my writing and creative productivity. It’s not about putting words to electronic paper — a basic text editor can do that — it’s about organizing and maintaining that text as the process unfolds.
My second book, Ohlen’s Bane, is possible because I am using Scrivener.
[UPDATE April 7, 2022: It is important to note that I have written ALL of my books using Scrivener. Accept no substitutes.]
I started out with a plot event list. This is basically a list of sentences, each describing a specific scene in the book, in chronological order of how they will appear in the book. Once that is done, I begin my work in Scrivener.
I create a new scene, or text card, for each sentence. The scene title is 2-5 words describing what happens, and the full sentence I created in my plot event list goes into the card description. I drag and drop those scenes into roughly equal length chapters.
In the research section of Scrivener, I create cards for each named character in the book that describes their physical characteristics, personality and background. I also create a page of place names and yet another filled with randomly created names that I may grab from as new bit players turn up in my story.
Once Scrivener is pre-loaded with all of my research and scenes, I fire the trigger and begin writing.
Ohlen’s Bane started off somewhat slowly. I wrote the first six chapters, about 10,000 words, and then read over what I’d written. It dragged. I found myself growing impatient for the good stuff to start happening. Thanks to Scrivener, I was able to drag and drop scenes to rearrange their order. I scrapped entire scenes — not by deleting them, but by putting them into a Scrap chapter. This gave me recourse in case I found a use for them later on, or even just to grab fragments of scenes.
After paring it down and reorganizing scenes into a better order, I was able to start cranking away again. Now that my story found a good rhythm, thanks to Scrivener’s ability to keep my book organized, I was then able to crank out 12,000 words in a single weekend.
When I finish one scene, I open up the text card for the next. Since it has a brief 2-3 sentence description of what happens, I am up to speed on what happens next and can bang it out in record time.
Scrivener really is a brilliant piece of software, and I don’t think I’d ever get my second book written without it.
