As a long-term investment in your writing practice, you’re not going to find better value elsewhere. Unusually for a professional tool, Scrivener only costs £47. I’ve been using Scrivener for years and it’s no exaggeration to state that it has helped me write more and write better. There’s an initial conceptual hurdle to leap, especially if you’re coming straight from Word, but it’s worth the effort. It’s packed with features but you only need to use the ones that matter to you. You can easily structure (and re-structure) your project and view it from a distance, seeing an overview of its shape that makes editing far simpler than in a traditional word processor. It keeps all your research in the same place as your manuscript. Scrivener was created specifically for novelists, with every feature designed to help us. It’s when you embark on larger projects that Word becomes increasingly unwieldy, because it was never designed to be used at the scale of a novel. It’s also usually fine for short form projects.

For writing letters or office work, it’s perfectly serviceable. Therefore there’s one app I would urge everyone to at least try : Scrivener I can’t write by hand simply due to my appalling handwriting, while I’ve always found Word to be inefficient for long form projects. The key is to find a process which gets out of the way. Whether that means using pen and paper, dictation into a microphone, Microsoft Word or Google Docs is up to you. As long as you’re doing the writing, you’re a writer. When it comes to the practical act of writing, use whatever works for you. If you’d like to improve your writing setup but don’t know where to start, this guide is for you. Over the years I’ve observed that many writers are stuck using old technology which potentially hampers their creative output. Writer Simon K Jones shares his most useful digital tools. This is part of our Method pack of free writing resources.

Scrivener pc lost my work