Follow the white rabbit.

That’s how the Scrivener tutorial should begin. After reading their tutorial and practicing all their little exercises, my mind turned to a fine paste and I required a nap. It’s not as if it were the hardest thing in the world. Although when you are finishing up the tutorial near the witching hour, well… probably wasn’t as focused as I should have been. I did learn a tremendous amount about my story simply because of Scrivener’s folder systems and quickly realised where I thought the chapters ended weren’t always the best place. The majority of my chapters seemed to be between two and three thousand words, and then suddenly one chapter ended off at roughly eight thousand (Mind you, my story is only ninety nine thousand, so roughly one tenth of my book).

I must admit I haven’t been enjoying converting my story from Pages to Word and then into Scrivener, but I do believe it will be worth it. On their website, I stared longingly at their packages for both Mac and PC. Personally, when I spend fifty dollars, I like to have something in return. Buying digitally sort of feels like voodoo to me, unless of course it’s free, but buying something completely digitally at that price feels strange. That day though, my will had broken. After toying with the trial for minutes at a time over the course of many months, my mind was made up. I would never ever commit a story into it while it was in trial mode. Fear of losing my work and organisation kept me at bay. The tutorial was a fantastic sales tool and I could see the value I was getting. After a long staring competition with my monitor, I decided to buy Scrivener from the App Store, a marketplace I had already trusted with my multiple purchases.

As the store loaded up, I found myself browsing the main screen for deals. I’m a sucker for a sale, the more I save, the more my brain believes in the value (even if I never use it). Link after link, image after image, finally my mouse came down upon a small button marked “Explore Your Creativity”. Well of course I’ll explore it, this button was made for me; so I thought. First thing to catch my attention was the Scrivener app, marked at twenty nine dollars. Fifty percent off. The value. Oh the sweet, sweet value. Before I knew what was going on my brain had already directed my hand and wallet into a purchase. Not that I was complaining… after all, I had already resolved to buy it at over fifty dollars! Savings for the win!

Now the gruelling process of converting and organising my novel continues. My lovely partner is still performing some edits on the copy she has, however without her edits I already know that breaking my story into chapters has completely unbalanced the story and pace. While I wrote it as one continuous story, with the only breaks separating the change in character, it seemed to flow properly. Now I’m realising though that the breaks I had placed into the story gave some scenes less attention then they should have. I must say though, even just trying to organise this into chapters through Scrivener, I have learned a tremendous amount about how my story reads and working on balance. I’m actually really excited to dig into the further features such as Character and Location breakdowns. I could also use a Magic dictionary of sorts to keep things consistent.

All in all, Scrivener is one of those tools I’m sure I could live without as the many other successful writers do. Although I will say this as a budding writer who looks for help anywhere he can get it; this is the most helpful tool I have downloaded. It teaches you structure, balance and gives you some general guidelines and helpful organisation strategies in your quest to become a novelist. Not only those but you also get a singular place to keep all of your research, inspiration and insane scribblings (or notes) that are pertinent to your current concept or story. Also, the ability to organise individual chapters by note breakdown or organise your trilogy into one cohesive work is immensely helpful for the beginner or inexperienced writer.

Now for those of you out there who don’t have it, get it! No matter the cost! The rest of you… what do you think? Is Scrivener worth its code?