scrivener

Scrivener: Free How to Use Book

Your Guide to Scrivener, the Ultimate Tool for Writers by Nicole Nionisio is available right now with a direct download for Scrivener users for free. Right click on the link and choose to save the file or target as to save this to your computer. You may also copy it to Kindle or an ebook reader if you wish.

This is a step-by-step manual for Scrivener users guiding you through the process. It covers both Mac and Windows versions, though focuses mostly on Mac. There are some differences between the two versions, but less with every new release.

If you would like to buy the book, it is available as an ebook from Amazon.com.

Other books available for sale include:

Scrivener: Organize Your Writing and Thinking

In the first of these Scrivener tips and tutorials series, I basically covered “What is Scrivener?, and hopefully you have a better idea about what Scrivener is and how it may help with your writing. I also suggested two Scrivener Bootcamp videos to help you really dive into Scrivener with great tips and techniques by a professional journalist and bestselling author.

In this Scrivener tip, I want you to think of Scrivener as a giant binder. In that binder, you have dividers and tons of paper and photographs you need to organize.

Yes, we are going to start with visualizations. This will help you learn how Scrivener works and how to change your writing style and habits in and around it, and help you learn new words associated with Scrivener.

Imagine all the research you’ve done on your poems, stories, novel, and manuscript. You may have photographs to inspire your thoughts to a place, time, or person. You may have maps pinpointing locations and paths traveled. If you are really diving deeply into a novel or memoir, you probably have research files, digital and paper, the results of days, months, maybe years of studying the topic, place, and people you are writing about. You may have plot outlines, character sketches, and tons of notes.

How do you currently store all this information?

The digital files are most likely stored in folders, either in a collective dump or sorted by topic, place, and possibly date. To access them, you open your file management program and track them down, or open the program you use to view and work with them and hunt for them from there. This typically is Microsoft Word, PhotoShop, or variations on those popular word processing and photo editing programs.

Web pages are typically bookmarked, only accessible when you are online and connected to the web. You might have organized these by folders and subfolders, but it is also likely that you just marked them all as bookmarks in your web browser, the giant dumping ground for web pages you wish to return to in the future.

Tangible materials like papers, print-outs from the web, photographs, magazine and newspaper clippings, paintings, notes, napkins with notes…all these things are either in piles or sorted into folders in a filing cabinet.

Let’s see, you are multiple programs for accessing digital materials. You have reams of paper stuffed into files and folders, and that big metal filing cabinet collecting dust in the corner of your office a few steps from your computer desk. (more…)

Scrivener: Bootcamp

There are two videos by a bestselling journalist and author that take you on an in depth but easy-to-do bootcamp learning how Scrivener works.

Along the way, he shows you some of his techniques, great ways of rethinking how you write as well as how you use Scrivener.

Pause and rewind as you need and rewatch them again and again as you learn more about how Scrivener works.

If you watch any videos on Scrivener, these should be the two you choose. They are each about 60-90 minutes long.

What is Scrivener?

Scrivener by Literature and Latte is software for writers. It’s tagline is “Outline. Edit. Storyboard. Write.”

Some of the members of Writers in the Grove recently purchased it based upon my advice, and they’ve asked me to present a workshop on Scrivener basics soon. In the meantime, to help people get started, this is an introductory series on how writers can, and should, use Scrivener.

What is Scrivener?

Scrivener is software for Windows and Mac. It is designed for professional writers to ease the process of researching and writing. It is used by professional (and not) writers, authors, script writers, poets, teachers, researchers, and anyone with a writing project.

Microsoft Word or its equivalent is used by most people to “write.” It is a word processor. It processes words. You can style and format them, making them pretty, and even write great papers and novels, setting up table of contents, chapters, page numbering, and indexes.

For a writer who writes many things, or is working on a book, working with a Word document is like writing on a never ending ribbon. Navigation is a nightmare. Finding things is horrid. It’s easy to get lost, repeat yourself, and just lose track of what you are doing.

Think of Scrivener as your pre-production writing tool, the tool you use before you get to Word. (more…)