Writing After the Fall: American End Times Part 3 The Biggest Tool

Scribblers use Scrivener - It's served me well for two big novels.

I mentioned before that I used a portable manual Smith-Corona typewriter for the writing I did before I wrote my first novel. There really weren’t any alternatives available. I remember reading a fact article in Analong SF by someone who had written a “word processing program,” and thinking how great it would be when you wouldn’t need to have a mainframe computer to run it. Then along came the PC and a $2500 tab at Radio Shack, which bought me a Tandy 2000 PC, 128kb of RAM, a 10MB hard drive, a black and white monitor, and a very noisy dot-matrix printer.

I’m not sure how Bill Gates got Windows 1 to run on his Tandy 2000, since the machine was incompatible with his MS-DOS operating system.

Which is why I had to also buy a $400 dollar Radio Shack version of Microsoft Word, which would only run on the Tandy 2000. This general setup - PC, MS-Word, and a printer became my basic writing toolkit for the next thirty five years or so. At the beginning of this period, when I wrote Dreams of Flesh and Sand, nobody in the professional publishing world accepted manuscripts and digital files. You had to print your MS out, pack it in a box, and mail out the dead tree version. For many years my postage tax deductions ran upwards of three or four hundred bucks per annum.

Over the years the hardware improved drastically, (you might even say exponentially) while MS Word got fatter, more complicated, and less useful for a working pro writer, and the printer became less necessary because the publishing world finally adopted digital manuscripts, but only if they were in MS Word format.

In 2012 I was preparing to embark on a huge project - a duology, a pair of novels, each a thousand pages in manuscript, that would tell the story of an America crippled by an EMP attack. After some considerable back and forth with my NYC agent Caitlin Blasdell, who had been my editor at Harper Collins for several books, I had a reasonable notion of what the bones of the thing would look like. At which point I ran across something very new to me, and very interesting, right in the nick of time.

First off, I have to confess that this whole project scared me a little. It was by far the biggest thing I had ever committed to, a sprawling work with at least six story lines including dozens of characters, at least ten of them primary, in many different locations.

I was also getting input from the readers at two of my sites, one a prepping site, the other my longtime blog Daily Pundit, and I needed some way to organize all of this for easy access as well. I quickly determined that MS Word wasn’t going to cut it for what I needed. So I started looking. I tried several pieces of freeware editing software, and found, as I’d feared, that you got what you paid for…not much.

Then I came across something called Scrivener. Originally written for the Apple OS, it had only recently dropped a version for Windows that didn’t have quite as many features, but still looked promising as hell for what I needed. The key selling point for me was this:

Best Book Writing Software: Word vs. Scrivener

Made specifically for writing books. While Microsoft Word gets more and more difficult to use the bigger your document gets, Scrivener gets more and more useful as your document grows. That's mainly because of its “binder feature,” which is a simple but game-changing advance for word processors. The Binder allows you to separate your chapters and individual scenes into folders and subdocuments, which you can then drag and drop wherever you feel like they fit best.

So, the bigger your project, the better Scrivener gets? Sounded like exactly what I was looking for. I downloaded the 30 day trial version, but after only a week of working with it, I kicked in the money for a lifetime subscription. It turned out to be some of the best money I’ve ever invested in my writing career, right up there with that first monster chunk I put into hardware. Twelve years later, I still can’t imagine using anything else to write a novel.

Here’s a screen shot of Scrivener as I used it to write Lightning Fall.

On the left is the binder, which gives me fast access to everything involved in the project: the actual manuscript, scene by scene, all the characters and the notes on them, outline notes, plot notes, and anything else I need to keep track of.

In the middle are the notes from my agent about the working manuscript. On the right is the actual opening prologue, which kicks off the book. It is a sort of axiom in the efficiency world that if you are faced with a big project, you should break it down into smaller, more easily addressed, sub-sections. From experience, I can tell you that this also makes time management much easier, because you can see exactly where you are in a project, and what things you need to prioritize, and in what order.

A key point to remember is that any time you spend in originally setting up your project in Scrivener will be well repaid down the road. If you set it up properly, you will end up with the bones of an outline without even trying.

Here’s a screenshot of the way I’ve set Scrivener up for After the Fall:

Some housekeeping I’m working on right now is to seach through the Kindle version published on Amazon to get character descriptions for every character as they appeared in the novel, since I never did that before, but that is how the reader knows them, so I’d better be able to check on them quickly and easily. I’m also doing some work on the individual story arcs, both for the old characters, and a few new ones as well.

And that is enough of that. The bottom line is that Scrivener is a really excellent writing tool that any writer working on a novel should take a good look at. Which reminds me. I did say something about posting the opening scene of the After the Fall, didn’t I? Okay, here it is.