A Guest Post by Deborah Raney

Deborah Raney’s first novel, A Vow to Cherish, inspired the World Wide Pictures film of the same title and launched Deb’s writing career. Thirty years, forty-plus books, and numerous awards later, she’s still creating stories that touch hearts and lives. A RITA and ACFW Carol Award winner and three-time Christy Award finalist, Deb is represented by our agency.  She is a Missouri transplant, having moved with her husband, Ken Raney, from their native Kansas. They love road trips, Friday garage sale dates, time with their family, and breakfast on the screened porch overlooking their wooded backyard.

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I’m probably not the best spokesperson for Scrivener, the popular novel-writing software program from Literature and Latte, because I certainly don’t use Scrivener to its maximum capabilities. I don’t even actually write my novel within the Scrivener program. I still use Pages––Mac’s version of Word––to write the manuscript, although I do copy the manuscript into the program once I have a final version, just to keep my project all in one place.

I also don’t know how to use Scrivener for formatting e-books. My husband does that for me with a program called Vellum. So I’m truly not an expert on Scrivener. I may never be. Yet, I do love the software enough that I paid good money for a tutorial and have taken several classes trying to learn more about the program.

Despite my lack of expertise with Scrivener, I am an enthusiastic fan of the software; and I can testify that it is a great program, even for those who haven’t yet figured out all the bells and whistles Scrivener has to offer.

I found the program very user-friendly and intuitive right out of the “box” (it’s actually downloaded from the Internet, so no box necessary). Here are some of the ways I’ve used Scrivener’s basic features:

• To organize my material
I find Scrivener to be a great way to collect all the various elements for my novel—images, research notes and resources, deadline and contract info, etc.—under one “roof.”

• To collect research links
It is incredibly handy to have all my research URLs/links and other research documents, interviews, and photos in one location. I especially like the way Scrivener serves as a browser window so links can be opened right within the program, without having to open another browser and risk going down a rabbit trail.

• To create a virtual bulletin board
Scrivener is great for “tacking” photos of characters and settings on a virtual bulletin board. I can also post virtual 3×5 cards with lists of my characters’ physical descriptions, personality traits, or any other list I choose.

• To keep a timeline
It’s great to be able to use scene cards, a calendar, or other timeline of my choice to plot the events of my story in chronological order. This also makes it easy to switch events around on the timeline if necessary. [Note for those of you who know that I am an “intuitive writer”: by “plot the events,” I mean after I’ve already come up with said events by the seat of my pants. Ha!]

• For help coming up with character names
Scrivener has a name-generator feature that is not only fun, but helpful if I need a name with a certain ethnicity or specific initials, etc. This is especially helpful when I just need a quick “throwaway” name for a walk-on character. Scrivener’s Name Generator came up with 50 names (and you can ask for more!) after I gave it the parameters of “a female with the initials S.P. and a popular British surname.” The possibilities are endless!

All of the above are, I’m sure, only a fraction of what Scrivener has to offer writers, but those features alone are enough to make the program totally worthwhile for me. And totally worth the very reasonable price.

Below is a screen shot of one of my bulletin boards (click the picture to see it full screen):