Scrivener - a lifeline for writers
I purchased and downloaded Scrivener the other day. It’s been a long wait, so let me tell you about it.
To me Scrivener wasn’t an indulgence—it was a necessity. As a writer, I have some fairly complex projects, some of them running at the same time, albeit at different stages of development. I’d heard of Scrivener and its write-minded ability to provide an excellent platform for organising writing projects years ago, and seethed. It had been developed for Macs, and I’m not a Mac owner.
The company, Literature and Latte (don’t you love that name?), recently released Scrivener for Windows and I was in. I haven’t been so excited for years and, despite their promised two hour in-depth tutorial dragging on for over four hours, the program went well beyond my expectations. And all for $40.
The Literature and Latte website has an active forum which I dropped in on recently. I can’t remember why. Alright put it this way, I’m not ‘fessin’ up to wasting a teeny weensy bit of time sniffing around their site for fun. You have to remember how excited I was to have the program.
In my travels there, I came across a post from a writer who was bemoaning the fact that the Windows version of Scrivener failed to have a very, very minor function that the Mac one had. A technician answered the post, explaining that it was something to do with Mac’s OS having an inherent feature that Windows OS did not possess, and that was that. Or so you’d like to believe.
Well, the discussion about this deficiency went on for weeks until one comment stopped the whole ridiculous performance dead in its tracks. ‘Surely,’ the writer said, ‘the purpose of this program is to assist in organising and tracking various complex aspects of the book writing process—something, by the way, we’ve never had before. By endlessly discussing the omission of an almost insignificant detail, aren’t we getting away from our core objective—to write?’
When was the last time you were bogged down in chasing minor and irrelevant details instead of getting on with writing?
