![]() It can export my entire book into a variety of formats: PDF and Word, which are handy when I’m sending stuff to my agent and editor, as well as both ePub and (with a little extra help) Amazon’s MOBI format, which are handy when I’m sending things out to my trusty beta readers. My favorite feature about Scrivener, however, is its compile features. I can relocate it to a separate folder of material, just in case I ever need to retrieve it (and I’m just paranoid enough to think I might need everything). I also appreciate that Scrivener’s organizational functions make it easy for me to pull material that isn’t working without deleting it entirely. This proved to be a handy tool in realizing when a chapter was written from the wrong perspective, as well as when I accidentally fell back to a more omniscient viewpoint. (I know other writers who break down to scenes-that’s not the way I process, but in the end, it’s about whatever works for you.) My book follows two major protagonists, so in later revisions of the novel, I color-coded the various chapters to reflect which character was narrating-green for Eli, blue for Kovalic, and orange in the few cases where the chapter contained narration from both of them. That’s because it lets me break down the story, creating separate documents for each chapter. I’ve been through a bunch of different tools over the years, but Scrivener has been largely a constant. Someone asked whether the tech story behind the years long development of the book was basically “ Scrivener + stuff?” Well, seems like a good a week as any to talk about the tools I used to write my first novel, The Caledonian Gambit ( available from fine bookstores now!). ![]() What I Use: Writing a Novel (or, more accurately, Writing This Novel)
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