How Scrivener Helped Me Organize All My Writing

Subsequently, I’ve avoided it for years.

Here’s what I’ve learned in my time.

Scriveneris an all-in-one writing studio.

It’s also pricey at $45, but you get a30 day free trial.

I’ve always been a fan of piecemeal style productivity stuff.

I needed a place to organize all my writing, and Scrivener was the place to do it.

Here’s how I use it.

Create Your Own Workflow

Scrivener does a lot of stuff, and it’s overwhelming at first.

Thankfully, Scrivenerhas a pretty robust tutorial section, so we get to skip the basics here.

Inside that binder I make a draft for each block of text and a research section.

Under the Synopsis section, I write out a quick thesis of what I want that section to accomplish.

Then, I drop any links or notes I want to remember into the “Document Notes” section.

Write: Finally, I move into full-screen mode, and start to write the first section.

As you’d expect, I don’t go through this system every time.

Sometimes I just open up a document and start writing.

It’s most useful when you dump your notes, ideas, and everything else into it.

This doesn’t just mean scholarly articles, I dump everything into my research notes.

This makes it easy to find later so I can stop thinking about it now.

Basically, you might label sections of your draft as to-dos.

When it comes to writing, I’m a serial deleter.

I have no qualms with going through anything I write and deleting lines, paragraphs, or entire sections.

As you’d expect, sometimes this is a problem when I realize I need something later on.

This comes in handy if you decide to make major edits and they don’t end up working out.

That doesn’t mean they won’t work in yours.

In fact, the Scrivener forum has awhole section for different use-cases.

This is great for things like papers, articles, or book chapters that have set word counts.

Export any way you want: Scrivener wouldn’t be useful if it couldn’t save in other formats.

Make custom layouts: Scrivener has a ton of menus and options.

Thankfully, you’re able to customize that stuff to your liking.

To store your parameters for future documents, just click View > Layout > Manage Layouts.

If you’re a writer of any kind, Scrivener’s worth a look.

Photos by:Unsplash.