Scrivener, yWriter, or other?

[Nekko]

I'm not yet familiar with the specifics of Scrivener, but in general metadata helps search engines find you. So, if someone is looking for detective stories and you have the words: detective, gum shoe, PI, etc in your metadata you have a better chance of your work coming up in their search.

[MagicWriter]

I have Scrivener. I've wasted a lot of time with the tutorial, and read parts of the manual on my own. It frustrates me every time I attempt to use it.

A few months back, I was cutting a story out of Pages and pasting it into cards on the cork-board, and every time I pasted a piece of my story onto a new 'notecard', it would erase the previous card that I had just created. I lost 7 chapters before I realized what was going on. I didn't panic yet.

I decided to close the file without saving, this way I could reopen it and have my story as it was, before I tried to cut and paste anything. That idea failed when I realized the autosave had been backing up every change I made, and there was no reverting back. Now I started to panic.

I wound up having to search through my external hard drive for the backup file to restore my story, which worked. Ever since that day, I do not use Scrivener for my stories.

If I ever figure Scrivener out, there may come a day where I'll eat those words. But until then, my pens and notebooks are serving me well.

Kudos to the writers that enjoy Scrivener.

[Fallen Angel]

Wait... doesn't anybody use Vi, Vim or emacs?

(Oldskool props for using Word 1.0 to those who do.)

[Nekko]

Originally Posted by MagicWriter

I decided to close the file without saving, this way I could reopen it and have my story as it was, before I tried to cut and paste anything. That idea failed when I realized the autosave had been backing up every change I made, and there was no reverting back. Now I started to panic.

I wound up having to search through my external hard drive for the backup file to restore my story, which worked. Ever since that day, I do not use Scrivener for my stories.
.

Scary, scary! That is the advantage of having Time Machine backing up onto an external hard drive. If you ever venture that way again I'd recommend making a duplicate to work from.

[Al Stevens]

Originally Posted by MagicWriter

A few months back, I was cutting a story out of Pages and pasting it into cards on the cork-board, and every time I pasted a piece of my story onto a new 'notecard'...

I'm not sure why you had that problem, but you don't usually put the story text on the corkboard's note cards. You put each scene in a text document. The notecards are for small synopses of what is in the scenes.

[MsDashwood]

Judging from the tutorial video I watched, the Scrivener would be useful for me. I tried to download it but it doesn't want to be on my computer. I get an error message, don't know why. I tried both the free trial version and I also tried to buy it. No luck. So I gave up on that.
(I don't usually have problems with that sort of thing but it just didn't want to stay on my comp. I have a pc.)

So I found yWriter, which seems to have a lot of the features I want. The only thing is, I liked that you could write the whole thing on Scrivener and have the outlines etc next to it on the screen. There doesn't seem to be anywhere really to write in yWriter, it's just for outlining?
I see that you can write so that it turns up down below in the Content field, but that is so small, it's difficult to get a real feel for the written piece.

Also, it's not possible to save what you've written, to a memory stick or something? I see that you can do back ups, but only to a different place on your computer, I think? Which means if your computer collapses, you still lose everything. I like to save everything on a memory pen, just in case.

Of course, you can copy and paste it into a Word document when you're done writing for the day, but then if you go back and change what you've written, you need to do those same changes to the document you've saved in Word, and it just adds to your work.

I just downloaded yWriter today, though, so I might have overlooked some features...

[Scribhneoir]

Originally Posted by MsDashwood

Judging from the tutorial video I watched, the Scrivener would be useful for me. I tried to download it but it doesn't want to be on my computer. I get an error message, don't know why. I tried both the free trial version and I also tried to buy it. No luck. So I gave up on that.
(I don't usually have problems with that sort of thing but it just didn't want to stay on my comp. I have a pc.)

When did you try downloading it? The Scrivener for Windows update that was released in the middle of June had a bug that led to errors like you've described.

The bug has been fixed, so you might want to try again, making sure you're downloading version 1.2.3.

[MsDashwood]

^ Hmm, maybe I'll try again. I tried downloading it today.

I downloaded from this page. It seems that's their homepage?
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

It doesn't say whether it's the 1.2.3.version. I just assumed since it's on their webpage that that's the newest version.

[Scribhneoir]

Originally Posted by MsDashwood

I downloaded from this page. It seems that's their homepage?
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

It doesn't say whether it's the 1.2.3.version. I just assumed since it's on their webpage that that's the newest version.

It should be. The features tab on that page shows that 1.2.3 is the current download version.

Hope the new version works for you. Scrivener is a great program (except for its irritating spell check/auto correct functions).

[MsDashwood]

Originally Posted by Scribhneoir

It should be. The features tab on that page shows that 1.2.3 is the current download version.

Hope the new version works for you. Scrivener is a great program (except for its irritating spell check/auto correct functions).

Thanks for the tips. Unfortunately it didn't work for me. The same thing happened again. I get a message about 'runtime' and that I should contact administrators. So I've given up now and uninstalled it again. Been fiddling around with yWriter instead, and I'll probably get used to that and find a way to use it that suits me.

[Silver-Midnight]

Is your computer updated, like the drivers and etc.? I think I had trouble with that once. I remember e-mailing them and having them send me a program-thingy. I can't remember exactly what it was. Haha.

[Teacake]

I have wrote most of my first draft in Scrivener, but wanting to tighten my outline I have just downloaded ywriter - so we'll see what happens!

[MsDashwood]

Originally Posted by Silver-Midnight

Is your computer updated, like the drivers and etc.? I think I had trouble with that once. I remember e-mailing them and having them send me a program-thingy. I can't remember exactly what it was. Haha.

Yes, it's updated. No idea why it doesn't want Scrivener.

Originally Posted by Teacake

I have wrote most of my first draft in Scrivener, but wanting to tighten my outline I have just downloaded ywriter - so we'll see what happens!

ywriter seems easy enough. I think I'll get used to it

[TribalCat]

I used the free trial of Scrivener last November and bought it for half-price at the end of the month when I won. It works great for me. I love being able to easily move things around, and the organizational tools are wonderful. For notes or when I'm away from my comp, I use a writer's journal and pencil.

[WittyandorIronic]

I downloaded Scrivener for Windows recently and I love it. Still figuring out a few bits, but it is really intuitive and easy to adopt into your process.

[lorna_w]

For a corkboard, I recently downloaded the free VUE from tufts.edu. So far, so good. Short learning curve.

anyone else tried it?

[calieber]

Originally Posted by Jamesaritchie

I really haven't found anything that so-called writing software can do that I can't do just as easily with MS Office. I usually do it easier and faster, as well.

I was curious about this, actually. My girlfriend has a coupon code for Scrivener and she's going to get it in a few weeks, and I just looked at the page for yWriter, and I'm not sure what it does that I can't do with Notepad and a spreadsheet and alt-tabbing as needed.

That's an honest question, not a challenge. I suppose the answer could well be "that's great if your mind works like that, but if you're a normal person ...." Also, I compose linearly, and I understand Scrivener facilitates writing scenes in the order you feel them and then stitching them together in the order they're supposed to go in; Burroughs would have loved it.

Originally Posted by Fallen Angel

vim, which is a bitch becuse it's harder to save in every five words. (No autosave.) It's simple and clean.

I have set Q10 up using Courier New as the font to mimic a terminal window's apperance, and thus vim. It works well enough.

I like Q10. It's clean. Keeps me focused.

[Al Stevens]

I spent some time today with yWriter. Its biggest deficiency is the sparse documentation. By searching its online discussions and FAQ, however, I was able to find most of the answers I wanted. I pretty much know how it works now, and for the price (free) it's hard to beat.

Scrivener and yWriter are tools for organizing writing projects. Certainly they don't do anything you can't do with a word processor, but they can make it lots easier. And, in some cases, a bit harder.

Given a choice, I'd chose Scrivener, mainly for the full-screen editor. (I like to type with nothing else to look at. Old school.) yWriter lets you plug in your custom rtf editor of choice (I used Q10), but the procedures for using it are awkward and error-prone.

[SianaBlackwood]

I do all my writing in FocusWriter, then copy it over to yWriter for organising. While I'm writing I basically treat yWriter as a paper-free version of printing out the story as I go. Nothing gets edited or moved around unless it's to reflect changes made to the original story file.

yWriter gets more useful to me later on. Right now I'm going through a couple of old drafts, adding notes and filling in the scene descriptions. Then I'm going to export the notes and descriptions and use them to build up a plan of attack for rewriting.

[JRDickson]

Tried Dramatica, Writeway, and Scrivener, ended up with Scrivener. Scrivener is great for fiction, but sucks for academic texts (the footnotes don't translate properly).

I like being able to markup by POV and theme--the tagging options in Scrivener are great, and it's really easy to organize scenes. Dramatica is fun, because you get to choose all these weird settings...but ultimately, weird settings do not productivity make. Writeway was lame...somewhere in the middle of the other two, and did neither model well.

Being able to split-pane your research or multiple scenes, and save searches are also awesome aspects of Scrivener. I think the learning curve is the main issue--all of the controls are optional, so you really DO need to sit through the 1 hour orientation demo to use the software properly. Once you've got it down, though, it saves a lot of time, in my opinion.

[JRDickson]

Originally Posted by MsDashwood

Thanks for the tips. Unfortunately it didn't work for me. The same thing happened again. I get a message about 'runtime' and that I should contact administrators. So I've given up now and uninstalled it again. Been fiddling around with yWriter instead, and I'll probably get used to that and find a way to use it that suits me.

You should ask them what environment it uses--runtime error means an environment/framework issue...you may not have Java or C++ or whatever Scrivener uses.

[Scribhneoir]

Originally Posted by MsDashwood

The same thing happened again. I get a message about 'runtime' and that I should contact administrators.

If you haven't gone off the idea all together by now, here's a link to the thread in the Scrivener forums about the solution for the runtime error.

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/fo...p?f=30&t=19124

[ShaylaElla]

I've been using Scrivener on my 13" Mac Air for just over a year, and I absolutely love it. Granted, I never really tried out anything else. But if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

[Ruth2]

I tried Scrivener. It drove me nuts. I didn't find it intuitive at all, but then I don't find my MacBookPro intuitive either.

If I could take a week off to learn Scrivener, maybe I'd figure it out. I'm on a deadline right now and just can't spare that much time.

[CatharsisChild]

I have a Brother GX-6750 typewriter. It's name is Ronin.