The Craft of Writing: Why I Use Scrivener

I occasionally get asked what app I use to write my novels. The answer is Scrivener. Reactions to that vary, with ignorance of Scrivener being the norm. However, regardless of the reaction, I almost always get asked, "why don't you use Microsoft Word?"

The answer to that question is, "have you ever tried to write anything longer than a one-page memo in Word?"

The fact is that when I sat down to write Red Cell, my first novel, I started it using Word. It wasn't pleasant. I won't list off all the reasons why; there have been many Internet diatribes by other authors that cover that terrain pretty well — google "Microsoft Word author agony." Suffice it to say that Microsoft Word isn't well designed for drafting long documents.

So I explored alternatives, starting with other word processors — Apple's Pages, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Bean, Mariner Write, Nisus Writer Pro — and found out that none of them were any better for the job. Admittedly, some of them might have improved significantly over the last decade since I dabbled with them, but at the time they were, as Steve Jobs once phrased it, "a big bag of hurt." It was like the scene from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix where Dolores Umbridge makes Harry write "I will not tell lies" using a blood quill. No wonder Ernest Hemingway drank so much. Yes, he just used a typewriter, but I think he saw what was coming.

In growing desperation, I tried text editors like TextEdit, TextMate, Bare Bones Software's TextWrangler (for you non-techies, that's an HTML code editor), Smultron (no link, that one's dead and buried), WriteRoom, and several others whose names I have willingly forgotten. None of them were any better (though WriteRoom at least takes a minimalist approach and mostly gets out of the way).

Sweet Mother of Mary, I even looked around to see if there was a good LaTeX editor that would fit the bill (every computer science student reading this is now shaking her head in utter disbelief).

Then I learned that there are specialized writing apps. With renewed hope, I checked those out. There were a bunch, I burned through the demo versions...and none of them felt right. At best, they weren't actively painful to use but they weren't exactly intuitive. I've written plenty of software in my day; these apps felt like software written by a engineers chasing a market...coders creating the kind of tool for a job they've never actually performed themselves. They probably interviewed writers and asked what kinds of features they would like, but didn't have any actual writers testing the software during its development. Even when they got the feature set right, the implementations were clunky.

Then came Scrivener.

Scrivener is the flagship app of a company called Literature & Latte. At the time, the company consisted of precisely one employee — Keith Blount, a Brit living in Cornwall, England. Blount was an aspiring writer who ran into the same problem I had. Fortunately (for me), he ran into it a few years before I did and decided to do something about it. Blount taught himself how to program and created the kind of tool that he wanted to use. Writing software coded by a writer? That was promising. I downloaded the demo, spent ten minutes with it, and the search was done.

Brief note: I'm not getting compensated in any way to say good stuff about Scrivener or its parent company. I'm praising it because I use it and think it's the best-of-breed writing tool out there. I've never met Keith Blount, but if I ever do, I'm going to take him down to his favorite pub in Cornwall and buy him a plate of bangers-and-mash.

I could tap out an extended diatribe extolling the many features of Scrivener, but you should really just go to the video tutorials page on Blount's site and watch the Introduction to Scrivener. If you're a writer (aspiring or otherwise) you'll understand what I'm talking about. If you're not a writer but have to occasionally draft long-ish documents — term papers, sermons, theses, dissertations — you might find it's better than a word processor for what you do. In any case, remember this: Scrivener gets the feature set right and it's implementation of those features is nothing short of joyous.

And for you non-Mac users, there's are versions for Windows and Linux (beta), and an iOS version is in the works. (Writing a novel on an iPad seems like another bag of hurt, but I won't judge).

So, long story short, why do I use Scrivener?

Because I don't enjoy pain. Scrivener is Percocet for a writer's soul. It makes the pain just go away.

7 – 1 ?

Total psychological collapse.

"Brazil's dreams of making a return to a World Cup final in the Maracana were shattered in the most agonizing manner as Germany inflicted on the hosts one of the most remarkable defeats in the 84–year history of this competition."

A face palm doesn't capture it.

I lived in Argentina for two years back in the early 90s, during which time Argentina went all the way to the 1990 World Cup final. I've never seen an entire city go insane with joy like I did when Argentina beat Brazil 1-0 in the Round of 16, then beating Italy 4–3 in a shootout in the semi-final. Each was a massive party — the entire city of Bariloche emptied into the streets and the happy riot went on for hours. Men hanging off lamp posts. Girls wrapped in Argentine flags dancing with total strangers. Little children and old ladies running wild. 

Then Argentina they lost the final and the Cup to Germany 0–1 when the referee awarded the Germans a penalty kick in the 85th minute. I walked the streets for a while after that loss. It was an utter ghost town. Total silence, the shock and despair as palpable as fog even though I couldn't see a soul.

We Americans don't understand the degree to which "The Beautiful Game" is entwined deep in the psyche of other countries. It's a second religion and the national players are the high priests. Much of the world just stops when games are played at this level. 

A 1–0 loss is a heartbreaker.
2–0 is a crushing defeat.
3–0 is a blowout.
7–1? Four goals in six minutes? Five goals in 30 minutes? The lone Brazilian goal a meaningless strike in the closing minutes? The worst Brazilian loss in the history of the Cup, certainly in almost 100 years?

Yesterday's game will torture the Brazilians psychologically for the next 50 years and I'm not being hyperbolic. Every time they see the Germans play, that 7–1 match will be what they think about. It will stop haunting them either when the current generation starts dying out or they exact revenge on the Germans in some comparable way on the pitch. Their national pride is deeply wounded, despair now runs rampant, and they will spend the next four years questioning everything they thought they knew about how to play futbol. And the rest of the world will watch them, every play, every match, to see whether Brazil is recovering psychologically or self-doubt is feeding on itself.

Brazil's first World Cup match of 2018 is going to be very, very interesting.

Voyager 1 has reached interstellar space

Astonishing.

"The confirmation that the craft had reached interstellar space was announced this week, thanks to some additional data from a third CME shock Voyager 1 observed in March of this year. By reaching interstellar space, it essentially means the craft has made it into the massive, empty expanse that exists between solar systems."

Launched 37 years ago and not just still functioning, but communicating with Earth despite having traveled more than 11 BILLION miles. Voyager 1 stands as one of the greatest engineering feats in human history and the bar gets raised every mile it travels.

I wonder if we'll ever be able to build a spacecraft fast enough to fly out, pick it up, and bring it home.

The Greatest Hack of All Time

This was possibly NASA's finest moment ever. If you've seen Apollo 13, you know what I'm talking about.

The one time in history when making a square peg fit into a round hole was a literal matter of life-and-death.

"This is the mother of all hacks, the genius device that saved the Apollo XIII crew from dying in their emergency return to Earth, as photographed during that trip using one of their Hasselblad cameras. Here are the actual step-by-step instructions that helped turn this mission into NASA's most successful failure ever."

Follow the link to read the actual instructions NASA cobbled together for building the adapter. The engineers who figured that thing out were a bunch of steely-eyed missile men.

Make it so...

View fullsize

"What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve." — Napoleon Hill

I'd give real money to see this in my lifetime.

"NASA scientist Harold White unveiled a new concept design for a spaceship with a faster-than-light-speed warp drive engine yesterday that most sci-fi fans will probably describe as gorgeous...

...To be clear, we haven’t yet figured out how to create a warp drive, but that isn’t stopping White from imagining what a warp drive-powered vehicle might look like."

Who didn't see this coming?

Judge Denise Cote and the US Department of Justice, apparently.

"Hachette is not the only imprint to find itself under Amazon's thumb as the online retailing giant has begun turning the heat up on smaller publishers in the U.K., demanding terms that one publishing executive likened to a 'form of assisted suicide for the industry.' 

Perhaps emboldened by its victory by proxy over rival Apple in the U.S., Amazon has been 'bullying' U.K. publishers to accept its terms, a representative from one shop told the British broadcaster."

You don't say. This won't stop until the judiciary overturns Judge Cote's decision, or the publishing industry is turned into a wasteland.

Analysis 101: Does the Answer Match the Question?

In my last blog post, I used New York Times columnist Timothy Egan's essay attacking Walmart as a destructive economic force to illustrate a principle of good analysis. After a bit of thought, I decided that it would only be fair to take a look at one of Walmart's counter-argument. (Check out the previous post for links to Egan's editorial and Walmart's cheeky response.)

I promise that this lesson will be shorter than the last one.

Principle of Analysis #2 — Make sure the answer given matches the question posed. 

In response to Egan's claim that "Walmart is a net drain on taxpayers," Walmart retorts that "We are the largest taxpayer in America. Can we see your math?" That's a gutsy claim since Walmart doesn't show it's own math — according to Forbes, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Apple, Wells Fargo, and JP Morgan Chase all paid more taxes that Walmart in 2013, so what's the basis for Walmart's claim? How is Walmart defining "taxpayer"? That's the kind of problem I addressed in my previous post and anyone who studied it will know which questions to ask about Walmart's claim there.

But there's a different problem with their answer that I want to address, which is: the answer they gave didn't match the "question" that Egan posed.

Even if Walmart is, by some formulation, the biggest corporate taxpayer in the US, it's still possible for the company to be a net drain on taxpayers. "Paid the most in taxes" and "received more in subsidies than paid in taxes" aren't mutually exclusive. So is Walmart a tax leech? Walmart could've said "no" and showed some math the prove it. Instead, they went for the cheeky answer, offering a statement that makes the company look good — "we pay a lot of taxes" — but they didn't provide evidence that Egan was wrong.

Any politician will tell you that one of the basic rules of debating is "don't answer the question you're asked, answer the question you wish you were asked." That's what Walmart did, essentially. It's a good tactic for the debater but it deprives the audience of the answer they probably wanted to hear.

So the next time you're following a debate and someone gives an answer that seems a little too pat, think hard about whether it actually addresses the question at hand. If it doesn't, the person giving it might be trying to hide something.