SPP 013 – Writing Better, Faster, and More Efficiently Using Scrivener, with Gwen Hernandez

Summary: This week, we delved in deep on what we feel is the best writing tool anywhere, ever, since the invention of the pencil: Scrivener. For this epic discussion of our favorite writing software, we managed to coerce Gwen Hernandez, author of the upcoming Scrivener for Dummies book, to join us on the podcast. Gwen started as a nonfiction author, decided she wanted to write romantic suspense and wrote a lot of it, but ended up blogging tips about the software she used to write it. She became known as an authority on Scrivener and ended up getting her first book credit for a book about what she used to write her books, which was very meta. Among the amazing cool things Scrivener has going for it are: It allows you to drag and drop scenes from place to place It keeps all of your writing -- and all of your research -- in one contained place It allows you to make annotations and comments in your work so that you can keep writing fast and address your short-term concerns later It allows you, as a self-published author, to do all the "heavy lifting" of proper formatting for different devices/platforms on your own It works for fiction, nonfiction, scripts, novels, novellas, short stories, and any other form of writing It saves your work meticulously, so that you're always backed up and never lose anything you write It allows you to take "snapshots" of your project before making changes, just to be sure and to allow you to revert at any time … and about a billion other cool things. Gwen also outlined a few cool features in this blog post about how to write fast. The wrap-up After we let Gwen go lest she contaminate herself with how idiotic all of us are after a while, we continued to kiss Scrivener's ass as being awesome. We then built a shrine to Scrivener. We sacrificed cows to Scrivener. We ran around naked in the moonlight in tribute to Scrivener. We then noted (seriously this time) that Scrivener gives you a 30-use trial to see if you like it and encouraged you to try it out so that you can see how terrible Microsoft Word truly is compared to its awesomeness. Oh, and then we gave you this link again so that if you wanted to pick up Scrivener, I could get a commission. Thank you! Sean also made a point to say that we should link this video about how James Ellroy Hates Everything in the show notes. It's not relevant at all, but it's funny as shit so we wanted to share it.