An Obliger’s Tool

I wrote last week about my struggles to keep promises I make to myself and reach goals I set for myself, as I am a classic Obliger.  Those of us who fit into this category need some kind of outside push to get going, and this push is usually described as accountability.  But, as I said last week in “The Accountability Conundrum,” it’s sometimes very hard to set up that kind of structure.

There are other ways for Obligers to get off the couch and get busy, though, and I’ve gotten hold of one just in the last couple of days:  a tool that makes writing fun.  Sort of.  It’s software called “Scrivener,” and I will include a link to its website at the bottom of this post.  Gretchen Rubin mentions her experiences with it in Better than Before, and it sounded as if it might be useful to me.  So I had downloaded the sample version a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t “read the manual” (another Gretchen instruction), and got totally frustrated.  A week or so later I went back to it and this time started in on the tutorial, but it all just seemed so complicated that I gave up yet again.  I looked around for something simpler, but the consensus of opinion on the Web was that Scrivener was it for writing long works such as books or screenplays.

So, this week I tried for yet a third time.  I plugged away at the tutorial and then gave its famous “corkboard” feature a try.  If you’re wondering what the picture is for today’s post, that’s the box of scribbled notes that starts collecting when I’m interested in writing about a subject.  [Note: it’s actually now a stock image, as the original was lost in the great website migration.] Trying to sort all those ideas out and get them entered into some kind of format is very time-consuming.  What I did with my previous book was to use a word-processing program, with a separate document for each chapter, and I had started on that laborious process with this material.  But then it was almost impossible to make sure that I hadn’t duplicated anything and that the ideas were in the correct place.  What finally convinced me to give Scrivener yet another try was the memory of what I finally did in that case:  printed out the entire manuscript and put each chapter in its own pile, using scissors and tape to move anything I felt needed it.  Gideon and Jim were appalled.  I just couldn’t face doing that again.

This time I kept going with the tutorial and then gingerly tried entering some of my notes on the virtual notecards that come with the corkboard.  I found out pretty quickly that the tutorial hadn’t covered some of the very elementary steps I needed to take, such as how to actually get the text onto the cards, but I persevered.  It was actually fun, and even more so was to then move the cards to the correct part of the (very rough) outline and see their ideas appear in it where they belong.  I think this may work after all, and gaining a good tool has removed what was for me the big obstacle to writing this material:  the slow and painstaking way I was having to do it with my old software.  (Of course, everyone, not just Obligers, does better work with the correct tools.  But for me, this tool gives me a push to work.)

To add to the fun of it all, Gideon got interested in it, too.  He’s been working quite faithfully on his school projects this week, but he said he’d ground to a halt on one paper because it was quite long and he’d realized that he needed to do significant cutting and pasting within it.  Scrivener allows you to import a document from another source and cut it up into manageable pieces while being able to see it as a whole.  Anyway, he’s really pleased–and of course he figured out how to do quite a bit within half an hour or so, while I struggled and struggled.  So now he’s my in-house Scrivener expert.  Nice to have!

Just so I’m including relevant information, this product is available through a number of online retailers, but as far as I can tell the originators are a company called Literature and Latte–have to love that name–and that’s where I got my sample version.  I can use it for 30 days for free and then will need to buy it for $40, which is certainly reasonable.  Here’s the web address:
https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php.