Hi, Though there are lots of discussions on writing software, I am looking to use Writing software specifically from 2nd draft, I already have the chapters as separate Google Doc documents. Hence I am creating this new thread. Here is what I need: I already finished my very rough first draft. Now in 2nd draft. That means, I am not looking for the software to plot for me. I want to focus mainly on polishing the story. Make the scenes more descriptive and interesting. I use Mac. Would love a good Backup process - not looking forward to email/or manual backup regularly. Easy to use. Must be able to go back and forth to the scenes and chapters. I currently use Google docs, would like easy travel between chapters. Offline writing is good to have, but not a deal breaker. Dont want to spend too much time learning the software. I am quite wary of having the software or the files corrupted. For that reason, I would like the backups to be in doc/rtf format, so I can use it anywhere. Able to set goals and tracking them. Have looked into LivingWriter and Scrivener. The steep learning curve of Scrivener scares me, but its lot cheaper than LW. Not sure about Scrivener's backup process, I feel lot of manual work to be there. I quite like the backup functionality in LW, but is it worth the money, can I achieve the same in Scrivener. Some of the users' experience I read of LivingWriter is quite scary: like data loss, unable to login due to network error etc. Or is there a 3rd best writing software that would help in this stage? Any help and guidance in this would be gratefully received.
Exporting to text from any word processor probably isn't a bad idea. For Mac backup, Time Machine is about as painless as it gets. For navigating scenes and chapters, do you need more than the navigation pane available in most word processors? I wouldn't ignore Apple Pages. It's more powerful and flexible than it looks. My main gripe with Pages is there doesn't seem to be a way to swap styles or maintain a library of style sets. Scrivener is a great application with a wonderful company behind it. However, a word processor with good style support and the ability to swap style sets will pretty much equal Scrivener's compile feature. At least in my use. Please post what you settle on. It's always nice to hear the solutions writers find.
That's its weakest point for me, on a Mac. When I compile it messes things up, always. Everything I wrote is there, but there are weird formatting errors (possibly my mistakes, I don't know). And if at any point I ever inserted the three asterisks for a scene break, even if I removed them completely, they show up, but not where I put them—in random places, in the middle of scenes, or anywhere really. Very annoying. But I don't worry about compiling, I just don't use it. I transfer what I write in Scrivener into something less buggy. In fact sometimes I don't write in Scrivener, I just use it for the amazing utility of the corkboard and the binder for plotting out the events of the story.
One method I use for backup is to create PDF and ODT versions of everything I write and copy them to an external hard drive. I usually put it all up on Googe Docs too. Multiple backups. But I probably won't use Googe Docs anymore because you never know if AI can scrape it or not. Most likely it can and does, or at least we need to assume it does.
I didn't have quite so many problems with Scrivener. I probably never pushed it much, either. Literature and Latte, the vendor behind Scrivener, is truly a friend to writers. I will buy paid updates as they come out whether or not I use them. I want the company to stay around. It's likely I'll write with my old school tools.
