Savannah Knightly

Have you ever heard of Scrivener? It’s software made just for writers to write in – it even helps you format your manuscript properly when you’re done! Which is really neat, but you might want to try it out with something smaller than a novel first.

Because I didn’t. And I screwed up my book because I used Scrivener wrong.

At first, it seemed to make sense to break the story up into scenes. Then, I could jump directly to the scene I wanted, and it would still all format together in the end.

Well, that didn’t work. Or not the way I meant it to.

Turns out the formatting doesn’t work quite the way I thought it did. It does work – I just think it’s not meant to assemble quite things the way I was trying to make it do it. Which means that having everything broken down into such small pieces was not great.

Or maybe I put them together wrong. Somehow, chapter titling and relations like that got mixed up, and it’s such a mess at this point that I’m moving everything into Word just so that I can make sense of it again.

But that’s not Scrivener’s fault (I’m the one that screwed up, not the software), and I’m not giving up on it. I still think it’s a great tool, and once I know how to use it better, it’ll be a real advantage.

Still, before I start a new novel in it again, I’m gonna play around with some demo text. Or maybe one I’ve already finished. That way, I can figure out the best way to break things down in Scrivener separately from figuring out the story.

I mean, figuring out the story is confusing enough without trying to figure out the software at the same time!