One of the "winner" goodies that NaNoWriMo offers is a 50% discount on Scrivner - a really sweet, Mac-only word processing and project management tool designed for writers.
In the past month, I've discovered first hand just how cumbersome writing a long manuscript in Word becomes - when you have 75 plus pages of text, it's rather hard to find just the detail you're searching for, even if you break your text up into separate 'chapter' files (which is what I did - starting a new file about every 5 days). Scrivner promised to make my manuscript more accessible, and to provide easier access to my notes and research. Sounds great, doesn't it?
I can now tell you it does everything it promised, and then some, to the point that I've spent more time in the past three days playing with my text than writing. They have this great feature which allows me to split or merge documents with a single keystroke, reorganizing them on the fly. And as I've split my document, by storyline has also bifurcated. I've created a monstrous, manuscript version of the hydra!
I should have paid closer attention to Scrivener's tag line - Outline, Edit, Storyboard, Write. The first three offer such seductive fun, it's easy to ignore the last. Oops!
Guess what I'll be focusing on tomorrow?
"The first 3 pages are a mess, but on that fourth page is a paragraph that works---and suddenly you don't care about the first 3 pages. You'll throw them out. Those are the pages you needed to write to get to that 4th page, to the one you had in mind all along, only you didn't know that, couldn't know that, until you got there." Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
ReplyDeleteGet the program!