I understand that I am prone to the tiniest amount of over-dramatization. I recognize that by announcing how a writing program has saved my life, it just might be misconstrued by some as perhaps overstating my case…but they’d be wrong.

Scrivener has saved my life.

I have known about Scrivener for quite a while. I discovered it one night when I was randomly searching the internet in hopes that there was something that would tell me how, and what to write, and then possibly doing it all for me.

This is the same kind of behaviour as trying to diagnose myself by going to online self-help medical forums. I can scroll down all the symptoms, muttering, yes, yes, that’s me too, only to find that the ultimate prognosis is for Elephant-Manitis, or something equally non-applicable to my situation.

Plus when I read the users describing their Scrivener epiphanies, it really did sound a bit too good to be true. And you know what they say about that little axiom. Also, it was only available for Mac users, and at the time, I did not see a Mac in my future.

Flash forward to 2012, where a), I am now a Mac convert, and b), Scrivener Saved My Life.

How you may ask? I’m so glad you did.

I have chunks of text and writing and random bits of everything stuffed in to various files and folders. It is NOT cohesive. It follows no rhyme nor reason but it is all part of this project that I’ve been working on. It includes everything I did last year on the Humber course, memoir writing, fiction writing, stuff written from a ten-year old point of view, other chunks from an adult’s point of view, but all of it related to this overall idea I have about the aforementioned “project”.  There is sturm and drang, yin and yang and probably there is even peanut butter and jam.

How, pray tell, was I supposed to organize this into some semi-cohesive whole? I seriously considered printing absolutely everything, throwing it on the floor, highlighting bits, cutting chunks and moving it around, but there isn’t a floor big enough and the thought of all those trees dying on my behalf made me cringe.

Enter Scrivener. I can import my documents, compare and revise them, ‘stick’ little post-it notes on the side with to-do instructions for the next steps, ‘pin’ index cards to tops of piles of text to summarize what’s in the pile and generally sort and visualize what I’ve got.

This is only the start.

I am just beginning to figure out the program. In spite of how I’d really rather not learn another bunch of icons, commands and buttons,  it’s already helped me make more sense of what I’ve got and what to work on next.

Now if it would just write the damned thing. Clearly, it’s not perfect.