Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
I am fairly ambivalent about the card view, but Scrivener offers other, much more useful, views as well.
There were two things I liked about Scrivener:
* The ability to have the whole project (research, notes, story) all presented in a useful, easy to see and access form.
* The ability to write in scenes/snippets and have it all brought together as a single view.
It's not that you cannot do these things using other tools, but Scrivener presents it all together in a cohesive, easy to use and visually appealing package. Added to that, it comes with probably the best tutorial system I've ever seen (including the various software that I've written  ). It shows you not only what the product can do, but how the product is meant to be used. (The latter makes a big difference in how effectively software can be used.)
I chose not to use it for a few reasons. High on the list was lack of support for styles. I believe this is largely the result of it using RTF rather HTML, although I have seen another product that implemented a styles mechanism using RTF (I don't now how effective it was). So I continue to use my old bits-and-pieces approach - it works for me until I can get around to writing my own solution. But I can certainly see the appeal of Scrivener; it's an impressive product. |
I agree that there's certainly a big old tutorial. ;-)
I guess I'm anti-foof. LOL. I like that I can do the same thing, in YWriter--and what I like about Ywriter is that I can force myself to analyze action/reaction and the like, AND (for me, this is a biggie if you are writing things that have to track who's where when) it will automagically create a timeline for the entire piece, for each character. Niiiiiiiice. I don't know any other piece of software that does that--they all require that YOU input the timeline stuff--well, hell, if you knew that, why would you need it?
I tried Scrivener multiple times. Like I said, I guess I just don't get it.
I really liked PowerStructure, for creating One Outline to Rule Them All. But I still lean toward using YWriter to create the scenes, with synopses, all the other goodies (everything from props to locations, etc.) and then, when it's "mostly done" you can export it to RTF and slap it in Word to do final edits, track changes, styles, etc. (And for the obsessively organized, you can, absolutely, dock OneNote to Word, so that for all intents and purposes, you have...Scrivener. No "card view" though.)
FWIW.
Hitch