Despite working in the tech industry for my day job, I've never been very high-tech with my fanfic tools. All you need for a story is the ability to type in text, right? A few basic formatting commands are nice (bold and italics), as well as the ability to synchronize your story between different computers so you can work on it no matter where you are (Dropbox is simple and robust for that). I've never needed or wanted anything more fancy.

All that has changed.

I just picked up a copy of Scrivener. I've barely started using it and I'm blown away. All of the tools I never even knew I needed are right there at my fingertips.

An hour ago, Haylander: Origins was spread out across three text files and a Google Doc spreadsheet:

- The story itself
- My language notes (Old English and Early Modern English reference, translations, and links)
- A random notes file: for character bios, cut-but-awesome dialogue, to-dos, etc
- An outline by scene

It's now in a single project, subdivided by chapter and then by scene, with each scene color-coded with its current writing status. Notes can attach to specific sections of the story or to the story as a whole, and open up in a sidebar while you're working on the relevant section; the character bios and language notes are within the project in separate research folders by topic. I can move between all of the different elements -- story, research, whatever -- with a click, and open them up side-by-side or in pop-out windows if I need brief access to something.

My outline spreadsheet is now completely unnecessary, because it's wholly integrated. Each chapter/scene (even the ones I haven't written yet) has a little summary, and with a single click I can go into an "index-card" view or outline view that shows me the scene-by-scene flow:

And all my freaking out over which scenes go in which order? Flipping the order of things around is as simple as a drag and drop.

Scrivener also tracks word-counts in real time; lets you set and meet word-count goals for specific sections or chapters; and has a distraction-free mode that blanks out the rest of your screen so you are looking at nothing but your words. Basically, every single thing that I've ever done to make my writing easier is built-in, and the tools that I'm using are just a tiny subset of its options; they swiss-army-knife it to work with a wide variety of writing styles, so that you can sit down with it as a simple text editor and then start adding in the features that are useful to you. My wife's about to start using it to type up a screenplay, which simply involves opening up a different template type and turning on some of the options I'm ignoring; it handles all of that formatting natively.

Still not sold? It is the only writing program I've yet found that lets you copy formatted text in BBCode format, so that you can copy and paste it directly into FIMFiction when you're done, 100% ready to go, without needing to worry about messy imports or meticulously re-formatting all the emphasized bits.

Scrivener's available as a time-limited free demo, but is well worth the $45.00 fee.

UPDATE:

A month later, Scrivener essentially paid for itself.

I was working back and forth between a few different computers (its license is remarkably generous about that) on the same story, synchronizing the story file into my Dropbox account every time I switched (this lets me easily toss edits in from work, or write on my laptop, when the creative bug strikes and I'm not at my main computer). But my network hiccuped, and somehow I opened up an old version of the file before my laptop finished syncing the Dropbox folder. I made a few edits and saved my changes ... and then, a few minutes later, realized that two days' worth of typing was missing. Dropbox, helpful little beast that it was, updated every one of my computers with the truncated version of the story file, and it doesn't have a history function. I lost several thousand words.

Except I didn't -- because Scrivener is even more awesome than it has any right to be.

Not only does Scrivener autosave every few seconds, as a backup against forgot-to-Ctrl-S syndrome ...

Not only does Scrivener have a "snapshot" feature that lets you save archived versions of a chapter for quick reference and reversion (which I hadn't started using yet) ...

But Scrivener, without any configuration and without even asking, automatically writes a totally separate backup of your story every time it closes the file. Since the main story file was in Dropbox but the backups weren't, I was able to go to the computer I did the lost writing on, grab the last-good backup from the backups folder, open it up, and copy and paste everything I lost back into the story.

Never mind that it saved me about six hours of work (even at minimum wage that pays for the program). It probably saved the story I was writing. In the past, I literally have given up on a story after losing several thousand words of it. Trying to recreate something I finished and liked, but lost, is the most heartbreaking thing in the world.

Further recommendations: GhostOfHeraclitus was dubious until he gave it a try and now swears by it too.