Scribbling with Scrivener!

First experiences with the writer's support app

On October 24th, 2024, I’ll be giving a free Zoom talk titled “Independent tools for human writing, translation and editing” to discuss why locally installed tools which can work offline remain important in this Online Age of AI Web Wankery. It’s not a comprehensive, detailed survey of all the myriad options (good luck with that in a scheduled hour), but rather some thoughts about pros and cons, and my experience with a few tools that are aligned with my personal approach and preferences for writing and translation.

One set of tools—specialized in long-form writing—is rather new to me. Or if it isn’t, I’ve mercifully erased some bad past experience from my memory. With several book projects in the works but progressing slowly due to the challenge of organizing a wealth of material and reducing it to something defensible as the essentials, I decided to ditch my old frenemy Microsoft Word and the hopeful contender Google Docs and try some “real pro” software. I’m test driving Scrivener and some related tools after reading a review of Atticus by Chris Stanley, in which he compared his fave tool with Scrivener. In fact, after reading reviews of many other writing platforms of this kind, I noticed that most of them make the same comparison.

After reading a dozen or so reviews, my general conclusion was that the disadvantages of Scrivener were in fact advantages for me. Particularly the lack of integrated collaboration features! (It’s easy enough to collaborate via simple workarounds on those rare occasions when I might feel like it.) Your mileage may differ.

So after my light week of first experience, I’d like to share my impressions, which I’ll update in the first part of the webinar later this month.

But hold on! Why am I writing about writing platforms on a translation blog?

You’re kidding, right? No. Real translation is writing, however badly some may do it. And quite a few of the good professionals I know also write long form monolingual articles and books or edit these, and a good writing platform can be expected to have nice tools for all this. So the potential overlap of professional translators with the needs of writers who don’t translate is significant.

Installation and tutorial

I downloaded the Scrivener installation file from the site of the provider, Literature and Latte, which took surprisingly long for a file that is only 180 MB in size. But I live in the countryside where the landline phones still have aluminum wiring and mobile connectivity can be dicey, especially with bad weather. However, I noticed no other such issue that day, so be prepared for a slow connection.

The software comes with an excellent tutorial structured as a book project, which one should read and perform the tasks described in the text on the text itself. If you really screw up, you can reset the whole thing. I had the impression that in an hour I learned all the basics I needed for a good start.

Then I started looking at tutorials on YouTube. Some of them are pretty slick. I saw a lot of details that weren’t even hinted at in the tutorial that I might want to use some day. I felt a creeping sense of dread, because I knew I wouldn’t remember them all. I remembered all those reviews that said how hard it is to learn the program. Fear!

I read similar things about my favorite translation workspace, memoQ, all the time. So I recognized what was happening. When you have a full-featured environment that can handle almost any routine and unusual challenge, it has a lot of features. Features you might never have a need for. Focus on the basic workflows that comprise 90% or so of your tasks, and you’ll typically find that you need to know a dozen or so of the 500+ features in the software. So it is with memoQ. The basic workflows are mastered quickly, and the software has your back if you need more for some unusual reason.

Microsoft Word is the same way. I’ve been using it since 1986, and I consider myself an expert. I can even do a pretty decent job of writing VBA macros in its arcane integrated code editor if I’m in a particularly masochistic mood. But I doubt I know more than 5% of the available commands and features in that program.

So it is with Scrivener. Do the tutorial. Then chill. Don’t let the advanced user information out there scare the crap out of you. It’s there if you need it someday, but meanwhile you can just get stuff done.

First blood.

I’ve got four book projects in various states of unreadiness, which I’ve been working on sporadically for about seven years. And notes for many more. Thousands of pages of notes, actually. One of the reasons these works are getting finished is that it’s very difficult to manage the volumes of information, including research notes, examples, graphics and photos, software configurations, test data, etc. I need something like I have for translation work in memoQ, where in addition to my carefully curated specialist glossaries and translation memories, I have LiveDocs corpora filled with monolingual and bilingual reference material and links.

Well, Scrivener has its versions of all that for a writer’s world. And the one-hour tutorial covers it well enough for my purposes.

I set up two projects, one for my long-delayed rewrite of the textbook prototype New Beginnings with memoQ, which I wrote for a summer course in Lisbon in 2015 and withdrew not long after publication, because the version of memoQ available at that time was full of bugs that weren’t getting fixed, and I felt like I was taking a share of the blame I wasn’t entitled to given that I’m not an employee of that company and have no influence on development and support decisions. (I’ve lost thousands of euros in contracts over the years with people who were convinced I was lying about that.) The other project I set up in Scrivener is the ill-defined work on regular expressions and quality assurance for translation and localization projects, which I’ve changed my approach to at least three times in the last three months.

As I began serious work on that second project, I felt like I was on holiday at the beach. I’ll be on holiday at the beach next week, so I’m curious if I’ll find that feeling was mistaken, or that I’m on the same holiday, or that it’s some kind of double holiday as I sit on the hotel balcony typing and dictating as I look out at the gentle waves in Monte Gordo. Rain is forecast for all the time we’ll be there, so work vs. beach will probably have only one option if I don’t want to get soaked from above.

Soon I realized that part of my problem was really that there were three books in that work, not the one I thought I was writing. That awareness emerged as I worked with the organizational Binder, the left pane of the Scrivener working window, which is a sort of outline tree with more shiny toys. Rearranging the content to reflect that realization was fairly easy.

I imported the reference material from its folders on my hard drive, and I began to sprinkle the text with reference links to my old blog posts, the memoQ online Help, various web sites for .NET regex testing and XSLT and a lot more.

Things were going so well that I decided to treat myself to a few YouTube tutorials, and in about 5 minutes I discovered that I could have saved myself a lot of copy and paste work had I known about a trick with a splitting character inserted at the start of chapters if you move a book project from Microsoft Word or elsewhere to this tool. Oh well. Now I know that for the next projects. And I’ll remember what to do, because my experience made that tidbit relevant.

That’s the thing about 500 features in a software program. Few of them are relevant for the kind of basic tasks one is likely to be doing, so just don’t worry about them all and get on with the work. And as you do, take a little time now and then to sample the wealth of information available, and you’ll find that Christmas can come every month.

This is how difficult but soundly designed software becomes easy. And Scrivener’s design principles are sound.

On to iOS!

After a few days my confidence continued to grow, and sections I had rewritten a dozen times in Word started to look like their author wasn’t an idiot. I was ready to prove that I really was!

So I decided to try the iPhone app. Or apps. Or whatever. There is a Scrivener app for iPhone which costs about €25 but has no trial. Not much money to be sure, but I’m not ready to spend that much when I am still not fully committed to the desktop application. Especially not when reviews don’t say it’s hard but is buggy, and the bugs aren’t getting fixed. I saw several apps with variations on the name Scrivo, which claimed to have integration with Scrivener but which seemed to offer a wider scope of options for syncing projects with the desktop Scrivener application.

Scrivo 4 was free in Apple’s App Store, so I decided to start there. Free is just another word for a 3 day trial, with monthly billing after that which would add up annually to the one-time purchase of the iOS Scrivener app, and the app was pushing me to try “AI”. I’m not a monkey, so I took a hard pass.

Scrivo 3, which also seems to be associated with the name Scrivo Pro in badly written promo materials, was a one-time purchase of €9-something, so call it €10. I decided to start there, and if everything with syncing works well, I’ll eventually get the Scrivener app and compare, because it’s all so cheap anyway compared to the time I’ve already saved and the progress I’ve made.

Setting up the sync through Dropbox should have been easy. The iOS app shows a document explaining how to do that right after you open it, and the steps are very simple. So was the connection to Dropbox.

But I’m an idiot. An idiot that was unaware that I had two Dropbox accounts and that my phone and laptop weren’t using the same one. There may have been a reason for that, but I’ll just go with stupidity for all the time it cost me to sort that out. So if you have more than one Dropbox account, be warned and make sure you use the same account to synchronize your Scrivener projects.

I did some quick editing tests, and found that the synchronization worked flawlessly. Hooray! Edits I make in Scrivo 3 can be seen a few minutes later when I open the same project (residing in Dropbox) on Scrivener, and vice versa. I do make it a point to quit one application before launching the other out of an abundance of caution from seeing a lot of syncing and corruption problems with this approach by CAT tool users. And back up, back up, back up your projects!!!

Weird header tags in Scrivo 3

One thing that’s sort of funky and irritating is how Scrivo 3 renders my H1, H2, etc. headers. These are enclosed in tags (see the screenshot above), which isn’t a problem for me, but others might find this disturbing, and there may be potential for corrupting these texts. I’m not in the mood to test that for now.

What I am in the mood for is getting on with the task of writing, and exploring what I may be able to do better with this new toolkit.