I used the full-screen mode in Storymill (and most other apps I write in) but with Scrivener I use the ordinary front end, because it is attractively enough designed to be pleasant to work with, and gives me instant access to all the other parts of the project, notes and other materials simply and unobtrusively. But in practice, Storymill and Scrivener are like an old Ford jalopy and a Mercedes respectively. From the spec sheet, either app would have served my quite humble purposes admirably. I am the very opposite of an organized writer and I don’t use 90% of the functionality of this type of software. I don’t really consider myself competent to review either product. In Scrivener, everything just works the way it is supposed to. To me this seems like an auto merchant saying “The car ain’t broke – you just have to kick it in the right place.”īy contrast in Scrivener, you just hit cmd K and your text is split at the cursor-point into two scenes sitting neatly on the zippy-looking clipboard. But what was not bad luck – what is quite standard and regularly stated on their forums – is that they expect scenes to disappear until a restart. Of course it might be that I had phenomenal bad luck both with losing the work and with the customer service. When I told them I’d already done that multiple times they asked me to send them my save file so they could retrieve the lost work.Īfter two more weeks, I wrote to ask them if they could tell me what had happened, even if they just said they couldn’t retrieve the work. Customer support (after a week’s delay) told me to restart. But then one day I tried it and they didn’t. This had happened before and after some struggling with customer support I was told that I needed to restart and they would appear. Two of the three scenes just disappeared. The way I lost my work was by splitting a chapter into scenes. You have to search it chapter by chapter. Having neatly arranged your work into scenes within chapters, there is now no way to search the entire work. But at the same time, it has no global search function. You can link up locations, times and characters to scenes so the app knows exactly which characters are in which scene and when and where it takes place.
But none of them stated clearly how much more professional, attractive and generally workable Scrivener is than Storymill, and I wish they had. Storymill has some features Scrivener lacks and vice versa.
My basis is that I read a number of comparative reviews before settling on which app to use for writing my next novel, and all of them compared the features in the apps. So that isn’t my basis for writing this mini-review. I suppose there are few products with which someone hasn’t had a bad experience. I call this a prejudice because I have seen angry customer reviews of various things by people who have had a bad experience, and generally they aren’t helpful. I know why Storymill is so called, because it ground a sizable chunk of my current story to powder. You can even share using different formatting, so that you can write in your favorite font and still satisfy those submission guidelines.I’ll start by stating my prejudice. Once you're ready to share your work with the world, compile everything into a single document for printing, self-publishing, or exporting to popular formats such as Word, PDF, Final Draft or plain text. Or check for consistency by referencing an earlier chapter alongside the one in progress.
Write a description based on a photograph. Need to refer to research? In Scrivener, your background material is always at hand, and you can open it right next to your work. So working with an overview of your manuscript is only ever a click away, and turning Chapter Four into Chapter One is as simple as drag and drop. In Scrivener, everything you write is integrated into an easy-to-use project outline. Grow your manuscript organically, idea by idea.
Got a great idea but don't know where it fits? Write when inspiration strikes and find its place later. Tailor-made for long writing projects, Scrivener banishes page fright by allowing you to compose your text in any order, in sections as large or small as you like. FROM LITERATURE & LATTE WEBSITE: Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds, used every day by best-selling novelists, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, academics, lawyers, journalists, translators and more.
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