🏛️ TREE 729: There is no law requiring you to use industry standard tools
12 years ago, I bought Scrivener to help me write my thesis. It did a good job. Several times since then, I have started projects in Scrivener. I always ended up moving them finishing them with something else. I did it again this month.
My Bonanza Clementine project is the biggest writing project I’ve ever embarked on, so on New Year’s Day I opened Scrivener and set up a project. Last week I got to the point that I couldn’t write another thing until I found different software. I hate Scrivener’s default font settings, they take too much work to change, the interface is too busy, the templates make assumptions that push you to make decisions about your writing too soon, the colours are wrong, it does too much1.
I did some research, tried another writing app that was worse. And then I discovered a way to manage long-form writing on the writing app I love, iA Writer. Glory and indeed hallelujah! I used my writing time Wednesday and Thursday to move everything out of Scrivener and into iA Writer. I feel unshackled. I feel like I can find my way into the story now.
Most of the people reading this story will react with a meh or ‘just use Word’ because most people are happy to just use Word. I don’t like Scrivener, but I’d rather sleep naked in a box of rusty knives than write something in Word. It’s ugly, busy and inefficient, three things that are creativity killers for me.
My point: you may be happy using Word, which is totally fine. But if you are serious about your creative work, there are probably some tools you can’t stand because they hamper your creativity instead of enabling it. There’s no law that says you have to use the same tools as everyone else. If you are using a tool that bothers you, take the time to find one that’s better. Your creativity will thank you.
The face I see when I say to someone, Let me describe my feelings about Microsoft and Adobe.
By the way, lots of software (Scrivener, Ulysses, One Note, etc.) makes a big deal about keeping everything from your project in one place. Guess what – if it’s all on your computer, or in your cloud storage, IT ALREADY IS IN ONE PLACE.
Grow slowly
Jeff
The good people who make Scrivener have realised they need to make book-writing software that does less.
This also opened an interesting topic in my own head this morning on how creatives might make assumptions/associations/preconceived notions based solely just on applications used for creating. Cough... Microsoft... cough. I'll do everything in my power to stay out of that nonsense. Got all my gears turning this morning, Jeff!
I use a notebook, Google Docs, and pieces of scrap paper but now I’m intrigued by ai Writer. I do tend to feel a little disorganized!