It's back, baby: Scrivener for Creative Writers
all those little folders and icons, it's so good
After an extended hiatus, I’m bringing back my one-day class on Scrivener, aimed at creative writers, and especially anyone using research in their writing.
The class is 2/17 at 12:30pm, 90 minutes, lecture/demo and Q&A. It runs a cool $125, but newsletter subscribers get 15% off with coupon code INBOX15. You can reply to this email or post a comment with any questions, and you can register here.
Here’s the spiel:
When a writing project gets big enough, in length or in scope, a single word processing document just won’t cut it. Writers of complex and researched projects need organization, flexibility, and tools. Sometimes that’s filing systems, or post-it notes, or index cards, or piles and piles of papers. Or it can be all one thing: Scrivener.
Scrivener is a word-processing program designed for authors of all genres, with space to collect and annotate research and notes, draft, organize, and revise. But it is a hefty piece of software, with far more features than any one project requires, or any one person can easily learn. This lecture-based class will provide a tour of the Scrivener features most useful for wrangling research, drafting, feedback, revision, and fact-checking of book-length or otherwise hefty projects. (But Scrivener is not only for books—your humble instructor uses it for everything from fellowship applications to essays to, yes, researching and writing her book.) This class is aimed at fiction and non-fiction writers, but will be most useful for writers incorporating research into their work. Students do not need to purchase Scrivener (or have any familiarity with it) prior to this class, but you can use the standard free trial to download the software and have a casual poke around to familiarize yourself.
Course Takeaways:
Get an overview of Scrivener’s layout and tools.
Learn how to organize a daunting amount of research and make it accessible as you’re writing.
Find ways to integrate Scrivener in your writing process, and use it to make that process more productive and satisfying.
See the options for big-picture structural revision in Scrivener, and get a sense of when to transition a project to Word or another program.
Figure out if Scrivener will be useful to your work.
And here’s what past students have said:
“Jaime shows you how to get started and then build upon that start. Unintimidating the newbie user alone is worth the tuition. Plus she's fun and humorous, and you get to see snippets of her book, which is clearly fascinating and amazingly researched.”
“So helpful, thank you! I am a clutter-brained pile maker and the tips you shared were so helpful. I discovered features I didn’t know about and new ways to use ones I did.”
“I loved the informal yet structured and informative content. The time flew by and there were tricks around every corner, in spite of my five years of Scrivener use. I was not expecting the material in context of a non-fiction work, but that was actually extremely interesting and I think offered more examples than a novel as test subject would have. 5/5. Cannot wait to take another class!”
“This is the perfect run-through of a sprawling software. Jaime is clearly a practiced researcher and organizer, and her tips are invaluable. I’m especially grateful for the cheat sheet she provided after class, so I could focus on her demos instead of worrying about taking notes. 10/10 recommend!”
Hope to see you there!