Also, Scrivener retails at around $40.00, which might be more than a beginning writer wants to invest. In fact, it has features you may never find yourself needing, especially if you’re a novelist or short story writer. Scrivener allows that, and more… a lot more. When you’re faced with a big, complicated document like a novel, it’s great to be able to break down the big job into smaller, bite-sized tasks… and to organize those smaller pieces any way you want, as needed, on the fly.

In other words, it’s a flexible, mutable outliner.įor many authors, especially those who plan their works instead of planning and plotting as they write their first draft, a customizable outlining tool is extremely powerful both in terms of organization and for productivity. Scrivener has a number of features, but at its core is the ability to organize small pieces of content in a hierarchical fashion. If you’ve been writing for even a short time, it’s likely you’ve heard of Scrivener from Literature and Latte, a self-described “content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents.”

Ywriter