A few months ago I switched to a Mac after half a lifetime on PCs. It's been a steep learning curve but I'm just about there. All the things I thought were intuitive weren't... and I still get confused switching between PC at work and Mac at home, but I'm now glad I made the leap.
It took a while to find a writing program I was happy with but I eventually settled on Scrivener. I followed the tutorial that came with it - and fell asleep several nights running. It's a little too comprehensive. I found it hard to sort out which features I really needed and which were peripheral to my kind of thinking and writing. In the end I followed my nose and muddled through several stories and articles, but knew there was much more to it, if I could just take the time out and sort through it all.
Today as I read a few blogs and limbered up for the day I stumbled on David Hewson's Writing a Novel with Scrivener. He cuts straight to the point. The features useful to everyday writers are explained in a few short pages. I found out how to go to full screen and back again quickly, how to use the dictionary and turn on the thesaurus, change fonts for the whole project, split documents without cumbersome double screens, rearrange the binder (I'd struggled for hours to work that out for myself). In short I'd been too interested in getting the writing done to fully realise the power of Scrivener for arranging, structuring, formatting, editing, checking my text etc etc.
After an hour with David Hewson I'm writing and using Scrivener to the limit. (Just had to tell someone how great Scrivener and David Hewson are!!)
Thank you. Glad you found my little book useful. Scrivener is simply wonderful.
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