Scrivener Trial

A few years ago, I had an idea for a novel. I wrote a page, then got distracted with other things. Last year I had some time on my hands, and went back to it. I put in some serious effort, and wrote around 42K words before I came to a hurdle in the story I didn't know how to overcome. I started editing what I had, asking for critiques (very helpful; thank you to everyone who's contributed), and generally polishing the story while waiting for inspiration.

One issue I discovered (really I knew it, but was avoiding talking to myself about it) was the lack of organization for my research, character development notes, and other relevant material. I was working from one Google Doc that held the story so far, a spreadsheet to contain a timeline (it's a time travel story, so the timeline is very important and gets a bit confusing), and another Google Doc to contain notes. Then there's the set of bookmarks for commonly-referenced web pages that I usually just kept open as a set of tabs, swamping the memory on my computer. I am loathe to think of being a research-oriented writer before the age of the Internet.

Since joining this forum, I've seen several references to people using Scrivener. I'd heard of it before, but hadn't previously had a need for it. Most of what I've written, by piece count, is short fiction, much of it "flash fiction". I can hold the entirety of a ~10K word story in my head while I write it down, and haven't previously needed organization tools to help. But a novel, with a multitude of robust characters, multiple locations, historical settings, and a wealth of details to keep track of as the story progresses across 100K or more words, well, that's a different story, as they say. So I researched Scrivener to see if it would help.

Yesterday morning I installed the trial version on my computer and set down to work. By bedtime, I had separated all 42K words I've written on Lives in Time into little sections, given them each a title, and updated the formatting to use Scrivener's tagging (this last was challenging, as my text is peppered with foreign language that is italicized). Today I'll start working on building character sheets, setting sheets, and migrating my timeline into Notes. Already I've drug a few of the sections into a folder labeled "Junk" that, after hearing critiques here, I've realized don't support the story and are more me talking to myself about the characters.

I feel confident that this tool is what I need to keep this story organized. It's not going to help me get over the hurdle that brought me to a stop, but it's probably true that without the hurdle, I wouldn't have stopped, and wouldn't have found the tool. I'll post more as I learn more about Scrivener and about my own writing. For now, I'm happy to be working at this again.