I’ve had the Scrivener for Windows beta for a few months now, and this past month I really started using it. I’ve always been one of those bare-bones people who prefers to use Word instead of any fancy writing software. That still holds true for shorts, but I’ve turned back to one of my novel projects, and its scope exceeds the organizational capacity of Word.

Scrivener’s true value became apparent once I started importing all my research files and images. Normally I feel guilty using multiple files for research; I label one "Geology" and then stuff several books worth of information into it. That’s probably an artefact of the floppy disk days–I started writing when 720 KB was the limit of my data mobility. That baseline 11 KB of an empty Word file always makes me feel wasteful. So I’ll use one file, and then have to index it by memory to remember which files holds the notes I need. Image files, of course, will be stand-alones, which means to look at more than one I’ll need an entire stack of them on my Taskbar. Awkward.

But with Scrivener, I just import everything into the Research Files section, in as many subdivisions as I want. And with the navigational pane, it’s easy to see and access what I have. While setting up the project, I discovered my research was more comprehensive than my memory told me. That’s always my biggest "writer’s block"–I decide I haven’t done enough research, and then the project sits idle for months. But with all the research in front of me, I have enough to push forward and fill in the gaps later.

Since July 2010, my progress bar looked like this:

Kings Ascending

17,455 / 85,000 words (20.5%)

Now, June 2011, it looks like this:

Kings Ascending

19,338 / 85,000 words (22.7%)

Hey, it’s progress, right?