A brief review of Scrivener 2

I've had Scrivener 2 installed on my Macbook for a month or so now and thought I'd share my impressions of it.  This is a perfect example of my tendency to buy something I don't really have a pressing need for, but which seems like it might open up new avenues of something-or-other, so I go ahead and drop 40 bucks and then immediately wish I hadn't and then, several weeks later, realize it was the right decision after all.  Scrivener is appealing in theory, annoying in practice, then, finally, excellent in practice.

Let me explain.  The idea behind this word processor is that it is designed for creative writers--it eschews those features of, say, Word, that are of no use to us, and adds a bunch that are.  A Scrivener file is essentially a wrapper for a bunch of smaller files, which can include novel chapters and sections, notes, research materials, character and place sketches, and the like; one can view the text of a given file, or a cork board that shows note cards for each file, on which you can type descriptions of its contents.  This is incredibly useful when you're writing a novel and can't remember where and when certain things happen; it also allows you to move material around by clicking and dragging the note cards.  Files can be automatically backed up to a folder in your Dropbox--a great feature.  When you want to print out your manuscript or send it to your agent or what have you, you compile it into a pdf, doc, or other file; this exported file includes only your primary text and not all your notes.  In short, Scrivener is a writing organization system with a word processor at the center of it.

Perhaps the simplest and most delightful thing about it is the fullscreen mode, whereby all the auxiliary controls disappear and all you can see is your text, displayed as though on a piece of paper against a black background.  I thought at first that this would be a minor advantage for me, but in fact writing with this minimal interface is an extraordinary pleasure.  You can't see emails coming in, you can't see anything at all except your text.

Here's the annoying part.  There are two separate sets of formatting tools in Scrivener: one that determines how the writing looks on the page while you're working on it, and another that determines how it looks once it's been compiled and exported.  This of course is useful, if you actually want these things to be different.  But I am wedded to the idea that what I am looking at is my manuscript.  In other words, I don't like the notion that the text is one thing, the display of the text is another thing, and the exported appearance of the text is a third thing.  I want to see, while working, that I am, say, on page 47, and I like that "page 47" to mean something definitive.  In Scrivener, it doesn't.  Furthermore, Scrivener's stock templates for composition and export look terrible, in my opinion.  I hate Courier--it is fake, a skeuomorphic gesture, the typographical equivalent of the PT Cruiser.  I don't want my name on every page of my manuscript, or centered page numbers, or a copyright notice at the end, or the like.  I want my stuff to be clean and simple, and I want to compose and export it in Garamond Premier Pro or Bembo.

Luckily, all this is totally customizable.  But the controls for customizing these functions are complex and unintuitive, and the method for customizing the composition screens is completely different from the method for customizing the compile settings.  You have to learn how to do the same thing twice, and once you've learned it, you forget it all instantly.

I recently transferred my entire novel-in-progress into Scrivener (see screenshot), and the process nearly made me give up using it entirely.  But I bore down and figured it out, and now I've got a couple of very useful templates and compile settings that satisfy me.  The app's usefulness has already proved itself in spades--I've had to insert, delete, or move chapters, and have been able to do so without needing to select text or renumber those chapters.  The note cards have enabled me to find stuff easily, and it is great to have all my research material close at hand.

But I don't necessarily recommend this app for people who need their work to look a certain way, or who are bothered by cutesy mimetic stuff like cork boards, or silly features like a character name generator.  There is something to be said for the starkness of Word or OpenOffice, and I'll probably still use the latter for short stories.  But for novels, the advantages of the app outweigh its irritating quirks, and I'll stick with it.

iA Writer, plus, my talk.

Here's a brief review of a new iPad app, Writer, by iA.  I had assumed, shortly after getting started with my iPad, that it really wouldn't be a viable writing tool--indeed, I must say that I still don't like blogging on it.  Pages, the standard Apple word processor, is irritating in a lot of ways, offering only the most meager collection of options, and making them difficult to access.  (Why, for instance, are you forced to go into a menu to get strikethrough?  There is ample room on the toolbar.)

But Writer is conceptually different.  It is VERY simple, eschewing all formatting options entirely, so that you can concentrate only on the writing itself.  It features an extended keyboard with--at last!--left and right cursor arrows, AND "word" keys that allow you to navigate through a document word by word.  It has its own custom-designed font, which is extremely pleasing to read.  It will automatically sync what you're working on to your Dropbox, so that you can continue your work on another computer, and saves in .txt format for full compatibility.  There's a special "focus" mode as well, that only shows you the last three lines you were working on--an unnecessary limitation, in my book, but perhaps useful to some.  I have already written a couple of letters on it and believe I could write a story as well.

I'd like to see one concession to formatting, though: tabs.  I don't like paragraphing using white spaces, except in a business letter.  But this is easily accomplished "in post," as it were.  A really nice app, and it's just five bucks.

I also thought I'd share this: the talk I gave at the Colgate Writers' Conference this past June.  It's called "In the Presence of Absence: or, Thanks, Blanks!" and is an appreciation of negative space in fiction (and in other forms, for that matter).

Our Typewriters

Oh boy, Rhian's gonna like this one. I was googling around for this new interview with Stephen Dixon that she'd been telling me about, when I stumbled onto a frankly awesome site called MyTypewriter.com. They have a section featuring various writers and their typewriters, and there was Dixon, and his Hermes Standard.

I know that typewriter well, because I've been corresponding with Dixon for like a dozen years, and he still uses it. Every letter I've ever gotten from him is typed, usually on the back of an abandoned manuscript page with a big ballpoint X over the text. For years I actually did this myself, sending people letters on the back of manuscript pages, because Steve is the world's coolest man, and I wanted to be cool in the same way.

Anyway, seeing this site got me thinking about our typewriters, and I went around the house taking pictures of them. They're above. (I think I'm missing one; Rhian will tell me.) The first is a big old Underwood--if it was a piano, you'd call it an upright. I actually wrote the second draft of my novel On The Night Plain with it, since it was a forties novel, and I wanted to write it using forties technology. (My Underwood is actually a sixties machine, though.) There's a label above the platen telling you the name of the shop in Missoula, Montana where you can have it serviced. I doubt it's still there. Sadly, when I picked the Underwood up from the shelf in my writing shed where I keep it, a bunch of birdseed hulls fell out--mice have been living in it.

The next one, a Corona portable, I only ever wrote a couple of stories on--the first draft of the short story that eventually turned into Mailman was one of them. It looks great, because it's in a very sturdy case. Little moldy blooms are all over the outside of the case, though--I need to clean it.

Next is a Remington we got at a yard sale. It's only ever been a display piece--it's sitting next to me now, on the dining room bureau. It's called NOISELESS 8, a name I've been wanting to steal for a rock band for years now.

Finally, there next to my knee, is our Selectric--I think the only thing I ever used it for was applying to grad school, but Rhian wrote on it a lot, and I think her ex-boyfriend did too. Or maybe that was a different one--at some point we had a few of them, sold the crappiest ones, and used the money to have the nicest one fixed up. At any rate, Selectrics were, and are, fabulous typewriters--that hum was like the sound of thinking.

The thing is, I started writing seriously on word processors. First, in college, on my roommate's first-generation Macintosh, then on a Brother word processor, the first I ever bought myself. I later switched to writing on Rhian's first PC, and then bought an impossibly heavy laptop. I now write on the HP Pavilion I'm using right now (on OpenOffice, of course, since I'm an open-source geek), or at my computer in my office at work.

I thought the experience of writing on a computer would result in drastically different fiction from writing with a typewriter. And while On The Night Plain is indeed different from my other novels, so are all my other novels. So I don't think it's the technology. But man those machines are beautiful. Someday, when the kids head off to college with all of our dough, I'll take them apart and put them back together, and keep them well oiled forever. But for now, the mice are in no danger of eviction.