Moving past those tutorials...

Bookshelf2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

During the past several weeks, since the turn of the new year, I have been exploring and attempting to learn a very comprehensive writing software program named Scrivener. I downloaded the Trial Version after I had qualified as a “winner” in the month-long NaNoWriMo writing effort—a minimum 50,000 word novel by the end of November.

One of the perks for doing this was a 50% discount on the purchase price of Scrivener, a program I’d never heard of previously. Not bad! I could get the thing for just $22 and learn to use it effectively.

So far, I have been pretty pleased with my progress as I work through its various features, many of which I’ll probably use very rarely—if ever. But I’m hoping to gain a vast and wide understanding of all that comprises the program. Call me a drudge, but I am tackling this as a quest, perhaps to eventually know it so well that I could teach others how it works and how they can put it to use.

I have even enrolled in a Scrivener online class that begins on February 19^th and have purchased the popular Scrivener for Dummies by Gwen Hernandez, who, as it happens, will be the instructor for the class! She and I have exchanged comments and e-mails regarding Scrivener, and I can see already that she will be a very helpful and congenial teacher and sounding board for the many questions and issues I’m sure to have during the six-week run of the course. My goal is to finally get past the tutorials and other explanatory examples and be able to put Scrivener successfully to work for my writing projects.

At this writing, my un-edited, un-revised NaNoWriMo novel sits cooling its heels in Word (in which it was created), and I’m becoming very eager to import it into Scrivener so that I can do the real work on it in chunks and sections and then compile it all for the next step to publication. As I’m learning—and will learn more in the weeks ahead—Scrivener is an excellent tool for accomplishing this!

The company, Literature & Latte, has a winner on its hands with Scrivener! I can say this despite having only a limited bit of experience and understanding of it. But what little I have at this point, I feel awfully good about its potential and what it has to offer me. In fact, I’m writing this in Scrivener and seeming to grow with each piece of text I create.

I'm wondering what anyone else thinks about writing programs they use. Please share here. In the meantime, I'm discovering that it’s truly great getting past the tutorials!…MLA