Is Scrivener Worth It? Finding the Best Writing Software for Authors

Choosing the best writing software for you can all the difference in your writing process, especially for long-form projects like novels or research-heavy articles. In my experience, I’ve found that Scrivener lives up to its reputation as the best writing tool for authors. We’ll look at its key features, how it compares to other options like Word, and why it might be the ideal choice for boosting your writing productivity.

When I sat down to start writing about my experiences with EMDR therapy for Medium, I faced a choice: I could spend time learning to use the popular drafting platform called Scrivener, or I could use something like Word or Notepad and begin writing immediately. In the end I went with Scrivener, and I am here to say I am glad I did. The interface was unfamiliar (heck—the whole concept of a “drafting platform” was unfamiliar), there were many tools and features and settings and procedures to learn, and it did take me a good several weeks to produce a usable draft in the form I needed.

Every minute of that time invested has paid off in the form of a drafting experience I could not have anticipated in advance, and will not soon abandon. Scrivener has become my tool of choice for the initial creative act of “getting something down on paper,” no matter the final form.

Here is the essence of the Scrivener difference: when you are drafting a piece of work, you are primarily concerned with generating content, not formatting. You want to write, not design, when you are in that drafting stage.

And this is what Scrivener does: it frees you to write. It does this by separating the drafting function from the formatting function, so that formatting can be done later. Word, by comparison, integrates formatting with drafting such that you inevitably end up dealing with both at the same time, all the time. And while Notepad and other text editors don’t force you to consider formatting as you go, they also lack the ability to add that formatting when you are ready. For that, you have to copy and paste into Word, and start from scratch.

Meanwhile, Scrivener offers a plethora of features that are specifically designed to support the initial creation of content—even if that content is only a couple of paragraphs. And once you are done, there is an equally rich array of features to allow you to compile—their term—your draft text into a fully formatted document complete with title page, headers and footers, fonts, all of the above. Again—a bit of a learning curve, because we are not used to formatting our documents in this way. But with a combination of trial and error and reference to the 700+ page PDF manual (show me a software program that comes with this much documentation these days!), in a short time I was able to set up a custom formatting template that takes the raw text I generate, parses it, and spits it out as a fully formatted Word document. It helped a little that as a programmer I was used to this compose-compile cycle, but I think any writer could master in a relatively short time.

So—leaving the compiling/formatting function aside for now, I can describe some of the Scrivener features that have proven most useful to me. In the interest of brevity I won’t go into too much detail, but I will try to give you an idea of the drafting experience.

1. The drafting surface. Imagine threading a player piano roll into a typewriter. That’s essentially what you get right in the center of the Scrivener screen—an endless blank page, with a typewriter-style tab ruler available at the top. No formatting details to worry about upfront, or ever really—you can just compose away to your heart’s content. What you can do is preset fonts, tab stops, and other features to suit your preference, so that your work surface always looks and works the way you like it.

2. Texts and Folders. Each endless page is a text in the Scrivener lexicon. It can be one paragraph long or a thousand (there probably is some upper limit; way too high to worry about). To the left of the drafting surface, texts are organized into Folders. There are two master folders, Draft and Research, which we will discuss in a moment. Within each of these you can have as many folders as you like, each containing texts and subfolders. This makes it extraordinarily easy to generate any number of chunks of raw text and arranged them into a coherent logical structure as you go. Also super easy to change that structure without having to cut and paste the text itself.

3. Draft and Research folders. The Draft folder is meant to hold all the texts that make up your actual document. The Research folder offers the ability to capture all kinds of materials—text, documents, links, images—and organize that into the same kind of folder/subfolder structure that makes it easy to keep track of and reference when you need it. This proves enormously useful in practice, because you can have all of your raw material at your fingertips without having to leave the Scrivener environment.

4. The Corkboard. Let’s say you’re drafting a book, and you have folders for each of the book chapters, with each folder containing several texts that are the sections in that chapter. Select a chapter folder, click a button, and now you see the sections in that chapter as index cards on a corkboard. Each card shows the section title and either a short precis of the section, or just the first few lines of the section. This lets you scan over the sections, and rearrange their order just as if you were working on an actual corkboard. Especially fabulous when you don’t know how the texts should be organized yet, and need to swish them around on a board instead of (again) endlessly cutting and pasting in a program like Word.

5. The outline view. Another button click, and you can see your entire document or any folder and its subfolders and documents as an outline. Yes Word does this too, and with some additional navigation features, but Scrivener’s Outliner more closely resembles a spreadsheet. Each of your texts (rows) can be assigned standard or custom attributes (columns), so you can track and group them across any dimension that is useful to you.

6. The Compiler. In programming, “the compiler” is another software program that takes in your code in as plain text, and transforms it into the binary machine code that computers actually run. Scrivener does much the same thing—it takes in your raw text and produces a document fully formatted according to presets that you set up in advance. And Scrivener lets you create and maintain any number of formatting templates. So you could have one for Word, one for ePub, one for PDF, etc., depending on what your needs were for rendering a particular body of text.

7. Metadata and Keywords. To the right of Scrivener’s drafting surface is another one displaying Metadata and Keywords for whichever individual text you are working on. “Metadata” refers to the attributes mentioned earlier in connection with the Outliner display. It corresponds to columns in a spreadsheet, and can be used to slice and dice your text segments according to parameters meaningful to you. In a novel, for example, you could create columns that allowed you to identify texts according to character, subplot, location, etc.

“Keywords” might have been called “Tags” or “Hashtags,” if either had been a thing when Scrivener was created. Like Tags, Keywords can be used to pin a label to a text, and then gather up all the texts that have that label attached. As an example, I created a lot of Research texts from books I was reading for a project, and then tagged them all with Keywords that identified the subtopics they belonged to. Then when I was ready to write about, say, “precursors,” I could Search for that Keyword across all my research and bring up all the texts that I had coded for that subtopic, from all the books I had read. I could work with the search results as if they were a document, or rearrange the contents to suit my writing plan by using the Corkboard.

This is an appallingly brief overview of the capabilities of Scrivener. I have barely touched the functionality that it offers. My intention is simply to give a potential user some idea of what a “drafting platform” is, and to offer my experience that the investment of time to learn the tool has been well worth it for me. Your mileage may vary. But in this era of subscription pricing for absolutely everything including dog food, it is notable when so much functionality can be had for a one-time price of only sixty bucks. Check it out.