I Use Scrivener Every Single Day - Here's WHY and HOW

I use Scrivener every single day. It is without a doubt one of my top five “must have” tools because it makes my life easier, makes my work more organized, allows me to work faster and is a delight to use.

Scrivener works on both PC and Apple devices. It is incredibly cheap and amazingly versatile. It resides ON your computer though you can and should store backups of your files in the clouds.

You Can Use Scrivener To:

write books
draft an outline
keep track of your characters, physical characteristics, quirks, background and growth
research anything
store extra material, research and reference links right beside where you will NEED that information
store images and whole website pages
create “cards” to track and move things around
move entire chapters around.
keep track of drafts
keep snippets of stuff you took out and may want to use later
write and track articles
track a series

Scrivener is especially elegant and useful for anyone writing a series. It will help you track your characters and the continuing action from book to book … all without having to open multiple separate files.

Scrivener has revolutionized the way I write articles for my blogs and for Medium. From the idea stage through various drafts to final completion and then publishing. I can easily keep track of EVERYTHING in one project file. I no longer pull handfuls of hair out trying to locate where that idea or draft is. I now know where (often multiple places) and when I published it … along with revenue stats. Talk about a major game changer!

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What Scrivener Isn’t.

Scrivener is NOT intuitive to use. Yes you can just start and stumble around looking for help on the internet whenever you run into a problem.

The biggest challenge with figuring it out yourself is that you often don’t know what you don’t know … so you don’t now what questions to ask and can’t look for help. The holes in your knowledge will plague you, mystify you and frustrate you.

If you are smart, you’ll take a course that will shave days or weeks off your learning curve.

I have learned dozens of programs on my own, and thought that reviewers were exaggerating the non-intuitiveness of Scrivener. I was about to throw Scrivener into a scrap heap when I came across a course that looked good. It turned out that Scrivener is actually EASY to use, but only if you know what you are doing! I had everything nailed and organized within less than a week. My whole writing LIFE changed in less than a week.

Click here to download and test out Scivener for 30 days.

The course I took and HIGHLY recommend is Scrivener Unleashed. I not only learned how to set up novels and non-fiction books but I discovered the fact that I could use Scrivener for my article writing. Check out my review on Scrivener Unleashed.

The crazy thing is … Article Writing is what I use Scrivener for the most. It helps me organize my articles, keep track of ideas and research for each article, track my articles through various drafts to the final published article … all with a click of a button, or drag-and-drop functionality.

As of this moment I have over 450 article ideas and article drafts for six different blogs. What a godsend … it has streamlined and organized my articles beyond anything I previously tried.

Here is a screenshot of how I organize my articles: you can see that I have a section to keep track of my tasks — what I am going to do next. I have a master list, AND I track my ideas, drafts and finished posted articles. I also have a section to track my social media promotions.

Before Scrivener, tracking my articles was a nightmare. I would lose the articles, have multiple versions of an article, never be able to find the research related to an article and would spend hours looking for an article I knew was “somewhere.”

Now my articles are organized, easy to find and easy to access. One of the real sanity savers and a major time saver is the ability to open files with one click. It takes one second to open a different article. I will never go back to Microsoft Word or Google Docs again.