As I was playing with the demo version of Scrivener, I just realized that any large writing effort requires considerable amount of work. There’s research, planning, multiple drafts of not only the text but also synopsis, and more. If your work has some kind of story, there are character back stories, locations, historical settings, and more.
Sure, I can throw everything at Evernote, but that will tend to create a mess, since you can’t group notes beyond notebooks and tagging. Or, as I originally planned, place everything in well structured plain text files, but over time the lack of tagging and meta-data makes cross referencing difficult. So, at a glance, Scrivener does offer a much better set of tools for writing projects, yet it is so powerful that it doesn’t fit well (or at all) with mobile devices.
Many may dismiss the idea that any writing can be done from a phone or even a tablet, but like small Moleskine notebooks it is just too convenient to be able to jot down something at all times. You can’t predict when you’ll get an idea, insight or inspiration. In that sense, typing down something in a cloud-based note taking App like Simplenote or any of those Dropbox-synced text editors can make very good “inbox” inputs. And then I might even try using the Nebulous App to view RTFs produced by Scrivener synced into Dropbox.
As you can see, my problem is that it can be difficult to define a good work process before you even attempted it once.
Published on October 22, 2012 at 21:40 EDT
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