Scrivener Review, Part Two

After pulling an all-nighter Sunday night into Monday morning, I finally completed my appellate brief to the Supreme Court. And fortunately for me, I encountered no problems during my hour long drive down to Charleston to deliver it in my sleep deprived condition. I felt like I was back in my first year of law school having to turn in an end of semester writing assignment. 
As stated in my last blog entry, during the writing of this brief was the first time that I’d used Scrivener, and I was impressed with its ability to keep you focused on the structure of your writing as you write, as well as being a database for all your source material related to the project. Now having completed the writing assignment I was working on, I have a few additional thoughts. 
The most difficult part of using Scrivener for me was when “compiling” my draft into a format for final editing. It took me a few tries to get it just the way I wanted, but if you google a query asking about compiling in Scrivener, there are several helpful articles.
Also, sometimes, you just have play around with a new piece of software to find out which variable is the one that’s causing you problem. After compiling my draft on the third try, I pretty much had what I wanted for final editing. The problem with the compile feature is simply that there is a plethora of options ranging from e-book format to standard manuscript and so on and so forth. I simply wanted something that’d look good in Microsoft Word, so I stuck with the Original format.
I was working on a pretty tight deadline, since I was compiling my draft at 1:00 a.m. in the morning and the finished product was due by the close of business that day. But an additional benefit to Scrivener that I found at this stage was that I realized that up to this point, for the most part, all I had been concerned with was content creation. I know if I had written my draft in Microsoft Word, I would have spent the whole time fiddling with formatting and other technical issues. When I'm writing in Word, I can’t help but think about the finished product, but while working in Scrivener, aside from counting up the words in the separate parts of my draft to give myself an idea of how many double-spaced pages I was getting close to (I ended up have 24 pages), I mostly just stayed focused on getting my thoughts in print.
But once I transferred the draft to Word, then my entire focus was formatting. Everything was transferred in single space, so I simply started from the top and went to the bottom formatting along the way. The biggest changes I had to make was changing the style to my headings so they would be recognized by Word's table of contents feature and formatting my block quotations. But other than that, pretty simple stuff, such as spacing and fixing tab stops.
Then it took me quite a few times to get the Table of Contents the way I wanted it (unfortunately, I didn’t notice until after reviewing the filed copy of my brief that it left out one of the entries, ugh!). And after that, I spent a great deal of time on the Table of Authorities. In the course of working on this brief, I was reviewing the last Supreme Court brief I had done, which would have been the last time I had bothered with a table of contents or a table of authorities, and I found that it had been almost exactly a year. Using the Table of Authorities feature in Word for Mac 2011 was a very cumbersome process, but oh well, its required so I had to do it. And of course, it was a heck of a lot easier than trying to manually type in the nearly 50 or so authorities I had cited in my brief and pray that the pagination not change. So…by 3:30 a.m., I had finally put everything in the final form and it was ready for the final proofread, which I did after getting a few hours of shut-eye that morning. After reviewing the finished product, I am quite pleased with it, despite a few errors that I'm sure I missed. And completing the writing project gave me an additional reason for why scrivener is great: task batching.
Task batching is a productivity concept that basically says its a lot easier to do a lot of the same tasks at once than to switch from one kind of task to another kind of task and so on. So if I’m at the office and I finished making a phone call, and I know I have two more people I need to call today, I might as well call those people right now and get it out of the way while I’m in my phone-talking frame of mind.
As this relates to writing in Scrivener, as I said above, Scrivener keeps you focused on one thing and one thing only: content creation. Then when you’ve created all the content you desire, you can transfer the draft to whatever application you like and work on formatting and other technical aspects of turning your draft into a final draft. This way, you don’t overload your brain. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that taking the few seconds it takes to turn a paragraph into a single spaced blocked quotation is going to kill you. But when you have to do that several times, you are taking yourself out of your creative frame of mind and going into your technical frame of mind. This may stymie the creative process.
Another aspect of Scrivener I’ve found that I like is that once I get those creative juices flowing, I am really surprised how many words I’ve typed up with I look down at the word count. I don’t know if this is mainly due to the fact that I’m not dividing my time between writing and editing or more because Scrivener breaks up your sections into its separate parts, giving each its own text file, and the act of breaking the separate parts up, really lets you focus on each to the fullest extent possible. Whatever the reason, I simply found that with this last writing project, my flow just seemed a lot better than the last complex writing project I did. Maybe this was a fluke or maybe Scrivener deserves the credit, but I will have to use the program a few more times to be sure.