Scrivener

I’m writing this article with my voice. I’m talking to my Mac, and the computer is magically converting my voice into words on a virtual page. I don’t have to type, I don’t have to hunch over my keyboard. I can sit back with a cup of tea in my hand and talk.

Dictating is a different way of writing that you can use effectively to change the way you work. Here’s how you can dictate with Scrivener.

Read the rest of the article on The L&L Blog.

To learn how to use Scrivener for Mac, Windows, and iOS, check out my book Take Control of Scrivener 3.

Many writers say that it is important to write every day. But not everyone is in the middle of a writing project; if you’ve written a novel, you may be in the process of revising it, waiting for edits, or even promoting it, so it may be hard to get to work on your next project.

But you can keep a journal. You can write, daily, of your experiences and feelings. You can write character sketches of people you meet and impressions of places you visit. You can write micro-fiction, poetry, and unstructured texts. Your journal can be a repository for your thoughts and ideas, and you can use it to flex your writing muscles.

Read the rest of the article on The L&L Blog.

To learn how to use Scrivener for Mac, Windows, and iOS, check out my book Take Control of Scrivener 3.

Do we need any more books? There are so many books that we could never read even a fraction of them, even if we spent all our waking hours reading. We read so much more than books; we are inundated by texts: websites, newspapers, text messages, emails, social media, and so much more. In this context, what’s the point of books anymore? To entertain, to explain? To opine, perhaps? To convince, to convert, to console? We can have AI compose text for us, so why bother to write?

Who will even read the book you write? Americans read, on average, a dozen books a year. But that average hides the fact that 28% of people didn’t read any books in 2016, the year a Pew Research survey was carried out. In some countries people read a lot more – in Iceland, the average as 28 books per year, and if you’re reading this article, your reading stats are probably well above the average as well. (And so is your TBR pile.)

With all the books that are published in all the languages of the world – it’s estimated that 4 million books are published each year – is there really a need for one more? It’s a bit hubristic to think that one’s ideas deserve to be printed, published, and sold. That your words and your thoughts have merit and value. That the story you have to tell will resonate with others, and that anyone will even remember it after they’ve finished it and moved in to the next book.

Read the rest of the article on The L&L Blog.

To learn how to use Scrivener for Mac, Windows, and iOS, check out my book Take Control of Scrivener 3.

Becca Caddy writes about science and technology, and her book Screen Time tells us how to make peace with our tech devices.

Read the rest of the article on The L&L Blog.

To learn how to use Scrivener for Mac, Windows, and iOS, check out my book Take Control of Scrivener 3.

Scrivener’s Binder is the nerve center of your writing projects. It organizes the many elements of your project in a familiar metaphor of folders and files. Various icons in the Binder, which is the left sidebar in Scrivener, help you see, at a glance, what these elements are.

There are lots of icons in the Binder, and in this article I’m going to show you what the different icons mean.

Read the rest of the article on The L&L Blog.

To learn how to use Scrivener for Mac, Windows, and iOS, check out my book Take Control of Scrivener 3.

Back in the analog days, many writers would use index cards to brainstorm and outline books. You would write some text about each chapter or scene on a card, then you could move them around and rearrange them on a corkboard or whiteboard, using pins or magnets. The free and flexible nature of index cards allowed you to arrange them any way you wanted, to rearrange them at will, and you could stack related cards to group them.

Scrivener’s Corkboard is an innovative feature that lets you outline a project using the visual metaphor of index cards but on a computer screen. In Organize Your Scrivener Project with the Corkboard, we looked at the basics of using the Corkboard; in this article, I show you 5 tips that will help you get the most out of this feature.

Read the rest of the article on The L&L Blog.

To learn how to use Scrivener for Mac, Windows, and iOS, check out my book Take Control of Scrivener 3.

AI has been in the news in recent weeks, since the release of several AI text generation tools that have shown both the benefits and pitfalls of using this sort of program. AI can write coherent prose, yet sometimes it produces results that are clearly false. Even so, as long as care is taken to check their output, these tools can provide factual information that can be helpful to anyone doing research.

Should writers use these tools? What do they offer?

Read the rest of the article on The L&L Blog.

To learn how to use Scrivener for Mac, Windows, and iOS, check out my book Take Control of Scrivener 3.

Read the rest of the article on The L&L Blog.

To learn how to use Scrivener for Mac, Windows, and iOS, check out my book Take Control of Scrivener 3.

The first draft of any piece of writing is just that: a draft. It takes revision and editing to shape it into a final work. For some authors, the revision process might not be too extensive, but for others, who rework their draft over and over, the process can be quite complex. While you may simply want to make changes to your project without leaving traces, some authors like to make edits in a way that they can see their changes, and perhaps revert to previous versions.

Scrivener’s Revision Mode is designed for these writers. You can have Scrivener automatically change the color of new and deleted texts in your project, and you can use five revision levels to record multiple edit passes. And snapshots, which allow you to keep previous versions of the files in your Binder, let you go back to older versions of your texts if you want to revert your edits.

In this article, I’m going to tell you about these tools that help you get from the first draft to final manuscript.

Read the rest of the article on The L&L Blog.

To learn how to use Scrivener for Mac, Windows, and iOS, check out my book Take Control of Scrivener 3.

When you work with a Scrivener project, you may have lots of information that you distill into your final work. You might have loads of research into characters, places, and events that you store in your Research folder. You may have drafts and sketches that you store in your project’s Binder. But you may also have notes; small bits of text, reminders, observations, ideas, and quotes that you need to check back on as you progress. And, while you write, you might want to take notes to remind yourself of things to check, fill out, and fix.

Scrivener lets you store notes in your project, attached to its files, and even provides a handy Scratchpad that you can use to jot down thoughts as you work.

Here’s how to work with notes in Scrivener projects.

Read the rest of the article on The L&L Blog.

To learn how to use Scrivener for Mac, Windows, and iOS, check out my book Take Control of Scrivener 3.