I never thought I would say this, but Scrivener is wonderful for putting a story together. What is Scrivener? Plain and simple it is a word-processing program and story outline designed for authors, writers, students, and bloggers, among others who do a lot of writing.
To be honest, I wasn’t always optimistic about Scrivener. My first-time hearing about the program was from someone who told me it was something I might find useful. Okay fine, that person piqued my curiosity. I did a little research, however, after watching a few YouTube videos, I felt intimidated by Scrivener. Yes, you could do a lot with it, but it was so overwhelming for a newbie. As I think back, I know now it had a lot to do with the presentation not being clear, concise, and to the point. That’s pretty much how I lost interest.

Okay now fast forward to the present. Out of the blue, I get an email invite about a user-friendly webinar explaining how I can get Scrivener to do exactly what I want. To tell you the truth, I was real iffy about it, but I took part, and I’m glad I did. The webinar was so helpful and well explained for a beginner such as myself. It helped in familiarizing me with Scrivener and explaining how I can best use Scrivener in managing my writing. The concept behind Scrivener is it’s basically an electronic huge binder that holds all your saved correspondence on a specific writing project (i.e. video and audio files, web pages, pictures, PDFs, etc.) in one place that is available to you at a click of a button. That’s huge for me, and I find it convenient not having to search all over my hard drive for something.

A Few Features of Scrivener:
• Piece it Together. Switch instantly between editing your writing one section at a time and together as a whole.
• Corkboard. In Scrivener, every section of your project is attached to a virtual index card. Scrivener’s corkboard lets you step back and work with just the synopses you’ve written on the cards—and when you move them, you’re rearranging your manuscript at the same time.
• Outliner. Like the corkboard, the outliner lets you work with an overview of a chapter, a part, or even your whole manuscript—but puts even more information at your fingertips.
• Print, Export, Publish. Scrivener has everything you need to prepare your manuscript for sharing with the world.

I could go on and on because there are more features, but if you visit Scrivener’s website you can get a better insight of the program. What I appreciated the most is before you pay for anything, you can do a 30-day free trial. That was so beneficial for me, for it allowed me an opportunity to see if this was a purchase I truly wanted to make. The outcome—it won me over.

My final words on Scrivener would be, try it out. Who knows, you might like it too.