Hevel.org: A Chasing after Wind

I recently posted about my love for Mellel, calling it a “perfect text editor for writers.”  It is designed for writing projects that require carefully structured and formatted documents, and it is the undisputed king of Hebrew, right-to-left word processing.

In this post I want to tell you about another invaluable tool in my writing bag-of-tricks: Scrivener.  It is a specialized tool for writers that gives you 1) a nice environment for planning and organizing a long document, and 2) a clean space for composing the individual sections of your work.

Writing with Scrivener

I tend to use Scrivener for 3 purposes.  First, I have used it to write shorter pieces that are part of a collection, such as entries for the New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible and Teaching the Bible Through Popular Culture and the Arts.  Scrivener’s “binder” gives me an easily accessible list of entries, which is helpful for editing particular entries and checking word counts for each item.   Second, I use it for sermons such as this because it forces me to structure my argument from the beginning.  I can use the corkboard to rearrange sections in the sermon, and to see an overview that highlights the argument being developed throughout.  Third, I am currently using Scrivener as the primary writing environment for my book, God’s Servants the Prophets.  Some screenshots will illustrate my points. (Follow the Flickr links to see full-size images.)

Here is a screenshot of the main window with the binder in the left pane and one section of my book in the writing window.

Every exegetical chapter has the same basic structure, so I am able to jump from section to section very easily, tracking sub-arguments within the book.  I can open a window that has every “theological traditions” section in the book, for example.  Or I can click on each “theological traditions” section in turn, making sure they they are all about the correct length.  By clicking the little circle icon in the lower right, you can add a word count “target” for the section, which will create a progress bar showing how close you are to your goal.

A click on the little icon in the upper right that looks like a layer cake creates a split screen mode in which you can have different sections open at once.  This is also helpful for consulting a text in your “Research” folder while you edit something in your Draft.  I used this feature a lot while writing about classical music for Teaching the Bible. I could open the libretto or other resource in the bottom pane while writing in the top pane (and listening to the piece in iTunes).

Here is a shot of the corkboard, which you can use for a bird-eye view of the book and to move sections around.

If I decided that I wanted to have the History and Theology section at the end of this chapter rather than the beginning, I could just drag the notecard into its new position.  You can see a corkboard that shows any level of your organization, from the chapters all the way down to sub-sections.  Also, you can type a short summary onto each notecard to remind yourself how the whole thing fits together.

Here is a screenshot of the full screen mode, which increasingly common in OS X editors.  Scrivener and WriteRoom were the first two apps to handle this feature well.

If you look closely you can see that the background is barely visible, and its opacity is controlled by the far-right “fade” slider.  Also in the “HUD” (heads up display) on the bottom are word count, document inspectors, and controls for how the page appears in this full-screen mode.  This HUD disappears after a moment and can be brought back up by dragging your mouse to the bottom of the screen.  Notice that I cannot see my Twitterific bird in the menu bar, my Mail app showing unread messages, or the ever-alluring firefox icon in the dock.  Full screen mode lets you focus on your writing without distractions, or at least it helps you along the path by protecting you from shiny, distracting things on your desktop.

Exporting to a word processor

Scrivener is for writing and organizing, not for type setting or formatting.  In order to finish your project, you may need to export your Scrivener file to a different format.  Options include RTF, Word, PDF, HTML, and even LaTeX.  You have minute control over which sections are exported, as well as over the export of notes, special characters, and fonts.  Here are the three tabs of the “Compile Draft” dialog box.

Notice that you can select which parts of the document will be exported, and whether the document will preserve notes and section titles.

You create a footnote in Scrivener by selecting text and formatting it as “footnote.”  An additional “ghost notes” setting causes footnotes to gray out and become less noticeable so that you can read past them in your editing.

Notice here that you can set the font for titles (if you included them in your compile) as well as the formatting for text styles you may have inserted in your document.  For example, you could change all underlined text in your Scrivener document to bold text in your Word document, and at the same time make sure that your lists are formatted with bullets rather than numbers.

Conclusion

Scrivener is one important piece in my overall writing workflow.  It serves as a great sandbox for writing, wedged between research apps like DEVONthink or Yojimbo and word processors like Mellel or Word.  It is sort of hard for me to imagine that most scholars do everything, from start to finish, in Word.  A full-fledged word processor is an important tool, but in my opinion it does not handle some aspects of the text-creation process well, including (ironically?) the actual production of words.  When I write, I want to write, not format text or desktop publish.  Scrivener lets me just write.

And best of all, like Mellel, Scrivener is crazy cheap: $40 for a regular license and $35 for educational users.  At Literature and Latte you can get a fully-functional 30 day trial, and also check out the great user forums.