Outliner, not a Pantser

So — if I was an “outliner” and not a “pantser” — then I had better learn how to outline. I felt like investing some time learning some well-established techniques would be worth the trouble. I was beginning to hear that one should never rush the writing of a novel, and give everything time to develop properly, so I figured I had some time to get this right. I began to hunt around for tools, books and guides for outlining and structuring a novel. I wanted to find a balance between structure and freedom that didn’t railroad my writing into a formula but still gave me time-tested tools for keeping my efforts focused and fruitful.

In the previous post, I mentioned that I was outgrowing Evernote. Most of this self-discovery about my outliner-ness came about while I was researching a replacement writing tool. I’m a Mac user, and the app that kept coming up over and over again in online discussions was Scrivener. I decided to grab the trial version and give it a spin. I haven’t looked back.

Scrivener essentially does everything I was using Evernote for, except much better. It is purpose-built for professional writing, and does an excellent job of integrating together the structuring and research notes for the novel with the actual scene writing. You can work on all the bits and pieces separately and rearrange everything extremely easily, and then “compile” the manuscript document from the pieces into a variety of finished outputs (from manuscript submission format to PDF to publication-ready e-books and more). Scrivener is much more than just a word processor (though it has a full set of word-processing features that Evernote lacks).

So I bid adieu for the most part to Evernote, though I have kept the original notebooks alive there for posterity and as an emergency backup. I still keep my Google spreadsheet alive since it has those cool formulas for keeping track of timing, but as I’ve started tracking scenes in Scrivener, I’ve needed to consult it less and less often.

OK, so now I had a tool that felt like it was a good fit for my writing hand, and was robust enough to carry through the entire process of building this novel. I still didn’t feel confident yet that I could structure this bad boy. It still felt like a huge project about which I still only had a dim understanding, and I could easily get lost trying to pull it all together. I needed a plan.