Progress report and Scrivener

I started work on my first draft this week and so far I've exceeded my target of writing eight hundred words a day. It doesn't sound like much, but if I set out to write, say, fifteen hundred words, I freeze and convince myself I'll never do it. The best way I've found of fighting the fear is by convincing it there's no reason to start whispering to me in the first place. I know I can easily manage eight hundred words and once I've got going I can usually do much more.

My progress has also been helped by the discovery of Scrivener. I downloaded it a while ago, on the recommendation of a writing group friend. However I was in the middle of my previous novel at the time and because it looked complicated I didn't think it was worth the bother of switching over from Word.

I wish I had. It's quite simply the best way I've found of organising my writing. And it's not so complicated. I spent an hour going through the tutorial project and that's all I needed to grasp the basics. Now all my research notes, outlines, character sheets etc are one click away, on the same page that I'm working on. Previously I had to save everything into folders, or bookmark web pages and I was always mislaying things.

There's no way I can talk about all the features, but there are two I've found particularly useful this week. Firstly, it's dead simple to create a template. Eg a blank character sheet or location sheet. I used a tip from Jessica Hart and cribbed her scene sheets. I've found these so useful for planning each scene and it saves me a lot of time in the long run as I don't have to work it out when I write the scene. The second thing is the target setting gadget. I can set a target word count for each scene and as I type, a red line gets longer and gradually turns green as I approach my target. It's a great motivator.

I can't recommend Scrivener highly enough. Give it a try if you haven't already. (I use the Mac version BTW, but a Windows version is also available.)