Scrivener and me

Having seen much praise for Scrivener, and since I own a compatible computer, I thought I’d give it a spin. After a trial period it seemed to offer quite a bit that I would find valuable and I bought a licence. Subsequently I began to find it over-complicated. The PDF manual is huge and not always easy to navigate; the settings and menu system are likewise something of a maze. In the end, I realised that Scrivener is not for me. In so doing I finally crystallised what I want from a computer as far as writing fiction is concerned, and am listing my desiderata here in case you find them helpful.

1. A distraction-free editor with easy export of text to other software.

2. Complete control over the font, line spacing, line width, text colour and background colour.

3. Cross-platform compatibility.

4. Word count.

5. Spellchecker.

6. An outliner or some other means of organising notes in a tree system, with the option of collapsing branches to make the whole structure easier to comprehend.

7. A spreadsheet to calculate and keep track of dates as they appear in the narrative, so that I won’t make mistakes with characters’ ages, etc.; and to be sure that a certain date is a Sunday, or whatever. For one book I even used a spreadsheet to plot phases of the moon.

Scrivener covers all these except 3 (it is no longer available for Linux) and 7, of course. Whatever else it has to offer I do not need. Others’ requirements may be different and I am by no means knocking Scrivener here: it is a powerful, well-supported piece of software and many writers love it.

I migrated from a typewriter to a computer in 1984, using the BASIC editor that came with the Acorn Electron! Each line of text was a numbered line in a ‘BASIC’ program; pressing the Return key generated a new line. Having perfected the text, I would type the whole thing out. This was marginally better than typing directly on paper because I could correct mistakes as I went and was no longer subjected to the perfectionist typist’s mounting fear as the end of the page approaches. 

As you might imagine, the process was laborious and I was pleased when Acorn released a word-processor for that machine. It was called VIEW and was rudimentary by today’s standards. In editing mode it offered a screen blank except for two lines at the top. It almost qualified as a distraction-free editor.

From Acorn machines I went to DOS. There my preferred editor was XyWrite III Plus. This was a full featured word-processor using a command line and, once you had learned the keystrokes, macros and commands your use-case required, it too gave you, much like VIEW, a transparent and mostly distraction-free environment.

I never got on with Windows and bought my first Macintosh in 2003. Microsoft Word was the best option at the time; subsequently I tried other word processors and wasn’t really happy with them either.

That changed for me in 2014 with my discovery of FocusWriter, which then ran on Mac OS X as well as Windows and Linux. (Version 1.7.6 still runs on Apple Silicon, but not for much longer; I am using it now under Tahoe 26.5.1. The next update of macOS will render it unusable). Later releases are for Linux and Windows only, which is all right by me because my principal writing machine is a Linux laptop running Mint. FocusWriter is in the repository and easy to install.

I have already raved about FocusWriter here and here, so largely speaking this is a rehash of those two posts, updated for anyone thinking of converting to Scrivener.

FocusWriter ticks boxes 1 to 5 above, except for Mac compatibility. Number 6 is taken care of by the CherryTree outliner. This again is Open Source and in the repository. Downloads are available for Windows and Mac. It is easy to use but feature-rich, and is an ideal adjunct to FocusWriter. With it one can create a collapsible synopsis, keep notes on characters and locations, etc., and store chunks of text deleted from one’s draft which might contain material of use later. These functions are true of almost any outliner: I don’t know whether CherryTree runs on Apple Silicon. If not, some alternatives are described here. In this place I ought to mention Obsidian and other Zettelkasten-like software, but that is a rabbit-hole you may not want to go down.

The spreadsheet I use is LibreOffice Calc, also Open Source and free to use. This is available for Linux, Windows and Mac and is hands-down the best spreadsheet for, as it were, lay use. Microsoft Excel probably has more functions, but I understand that Calc is very close behind.

So there you have it. A free and Open Source, potential alternative to Scrivener for some writers, which, with the possible exception of the outliner, works without a hitch on Windows, Linux and Intel-based Macs (and, for FocusWriter, those modern Macs running Tahoe 26.5.1 or below).