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Testimonials for Scrivener
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“Scrivener is where I live. I'm planning the next novel, two screenplays and a couple of short stories with it and it's amazing how fluid the software makes the process. I genuinely think this is the biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.”
- Michael Marshall Smith, best-selling author of Spares, Only Forward and The Straw Men.
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“The last few years have seen the appearance of several OS X applications designed for the use of writers. Many of these applications are very good -- but every one is in some way lacking. I've tried them all, and none has been more than a temporary home; a good place to stay until something better came along. And guess what -- it finally did. SCRIVENER incorporates and improves the best aspects of its progenitors and, in doing so, exceeds them all. As a writer's application, Scrivener is damn near perfect; it means outlines, treatments and then first drafts can be put together in the same application.”
- Neil Cross long-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize for his novel Always the Sun and screenwriter for the acclaimed BBC1 show Spooks.
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“I'm in love! With Scrivener. He - sorry, it - has totally changed my life.
I was first introduced to Scrivener in an e-mail from my long-suffering Brother. I ignored him - sorry, it - completely. As if a piece of crummy software is going to make any difference to my creativity! I pressed delete.
Fortunately, I got a second chance. A writer friend of mine re-introduced me to Scrivener ("Haven't we met?" "No, I don't think so." "I remember! Your brother introduced us! And you totally snubbed me! But fortunately I don't bear a grudge, and you can have me for a 30-day free trial, and then for life for a single payment of around £34." If only all relationships were so straightforward.)
And now it's love. Proper head over heels. Scrivener is amazing. He's - sorry, it's - everything I could dream of in a word processor. Where to even begin? Everything about him - sorry, it - is incredible. Intuitive. Adaptive. User friendly in ways I couldn't ever have imagined from my mispent youth with other computer programmes. I never knew I could feel this way about anything I could download legally. I don't want to nauseate you. I don't want you tutting "get a study". But I've never known multiple functions like this before... Truly, he's - sorry, it's - made me into a whole new writer.”
- Marie Phillips, author Gods Behaving Badly.
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“Thank you for the excellent and extraordinary work you've done on Scrivener; anyone can write a sodding book but it takes cojones to produce a writer's toolbench like this. Having played with it for a couple of weeks, it's now up and running in anger. Score so far: 1 film outline, 1 chapter of the new book, 2 radio scripts, 1 piece for the Observer, 2 Independent on Sunday op-eds, 3 lectures, and on it goes... Scrivener fills the gap between wild promiscuous note-taking (DevonThink), mapping connections and lines of argument (Tinderbox) and producing the final draft (Mellel). My workflow is now complete. Scrivener has done something unforgiveable: removed my last excuse for idling.”
- Michael Bywater, journalist and author of Big Babies: Or, Why Can't We Just Grow Up? and Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost and Where Did It Go?.
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“I've been trying so-called 'writers' software' for more than twenty years and always stumbling back to Word. Until Scrivener. Good software is like good writing, invisible to the user. The focus, simplicity and clarity is astonishing, and the absence of hype and jargon just as welcome too. The more I use it, the more I realise it can replace every other application I've adopted over the years for writing books that are often lengthy and involve substantial amounts of detailed research.
The seventh book in the Nic Costa series will be delivered from within Scrivener, and the eighth will begin as an outline there too. Finally a true word processor for authors has arrived.”
- David Hewson, author of the best-selling Nic Costa series of novels including The Seventh Sacrament and The Lizard's Bite and former technology columnist for the Sunday Times.
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“I use Scrivener with great pleasure for all my writing: journalism and books, fiction and non-fiction. It lets me work the way I want, keeping my research and notes close by and visible, or out of my way, and enables me to play around with structure easily. The interface and overall concept is elegant and flexible. It offers me multiple ways of seeing my work, but when I need to, I can just write without distraction. Not just useful, but a real pleasure.”
- Jenny Diski, author of Apology for the Woman Writing, Only Human and Rainforest.
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“My greatest ally as a script writer isn't the pen or word processor -- it's the corkboard. A mental playground to organize my thoughts. For years I've been searching for the digital equivalent -- a place in the computer where I can structure a script, or pin up the logline for a potential TV series, or keep an inspiring image. In the real world, those snippets and index cards often end up buried somewhere, forgotten. With Scrivener, I can keep them tacked to my virtual corkboard forever, waiting for the day when I happily rediscover them... Scrivener has so many useful features, there's almost too many to list. The full screen mode can't be beat for blocking out the distractions of the internet and e-mail -- if only it could unplug my ethernet cable to keep me from goofing off. I've tried other writing programs for the Mac, but none of them really fit my style. If I had the brains and the patience, Scrivener is the program I would've written for myself. Try it, you'll be hooked.”
- Mike Sussman, Writer-Producer, Star Trek: Voyager, Enterprise, Threshold.
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“I love Scrivener. It breaks the mass of information and draft text I need to do a 100,000 word novel into pieces that make sense in storytelling instead of following a rigid, non-intuitive outline. One scene per file means one index card per scene with the crucial information on it so I can work deep in a scene in detail and then with one click see that scene in the context of the entire book. I've got my reference photos in the column by the scene at all times, no clicking around on my desktop to find them, and my URLs are there, too, if I need to go back and check my sources. I can move scenes around, double check to make sure I'm distributing my point-of-views evenly, check on the word counts of my acts... it marries the flexibility I need to stay creative with the organization I need to save time and see the book as a whole. It's simply the best software ever for writing a novel. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
- Jennifer Crusie is a best-selling and award-winning romantic novelist. Her novels include Bet Me and Sizzle.
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“Scrivener is the biggest leap forward in writing software since the venerable days of WordPerfect, and believe me, I've tried them all. It adapts to my workflow, rather than imposing one on me, which is vital for working on multiple books in different formats. Scrivener has become my primary writing tool for both comics and prose, and unlike certain other writing programs I actually look forward to working in it all day. My productivity is up, my blood pressure is down, and my credit card didn't even blink. I look back and wonder how I ever worked without it.”
- Comics writer and novelist Antony Johnston, author of Wasteland, the Alex Rider graphic novels and Stealing Life.
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“While there are dozens of reasons to buy a Mac, if you're a novelist, you only need one. Scrivener. I use it every day, and it's the only thing that's had such a positive impact on my writing---making my work both easier and more fun---since I went from the typewriter to a computer back in 1986. The notecarding feature alone is worth the price of admission. But then, so are ten or fifteen other features I could name.”
- Holly Lisle, author of The Secret Texts and Talyn.
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“Scrivener is a Swiss Army Knife for novelists. It's not just a word processor, or an outliner, or a note-keeper; it's all of the above, and more.”
- Charles Stross, author of Saturn's Children, Accelerando and Singularity Sky, and happy Scrivener.
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“As a novelist and Mac fan, Scrivener's my first choice for writing anything longer than a blog post.”
- Martin Sketchley, author of The Liberty Gun, The Destiny Mask and The Affinity Trap.
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“I have bought, and been disappointed, by nearly every writing tool available for the Mac. Each one would have a unique feature that I loved, but would be lacking in some other regard, so I found myself moving projects in and out of different pieces of software as I wanted certain tools. But then I stumbled over the Literature & Latte site and my world changed. Scrivener is simultaneously the most featured and flexible writing tool I've ever used. Within fifteen minutes of launching it, I was in love.
I used to use separate applications for comic book scripts, my journal, research projects and my novel manuscript. Scrivener has replaced all of them. As much as I love the flexibility of creating and organizing the actual script or manuscript, the single greatest feature of Scrivener is the ability to keep every disparate snippet of text and random photographic reference in a single Scrivener project along with the work in progress. I am a horribly disorganized individual and all of my projects end up requiring extensive amounts of reference material. Pasting it all into the project doc has literally saved me hours of time. I would never have finished the scripts for Resident Evil or my novel manuscript without Scrivener.”
- Ricardo Sanchez is the writer for Wildstorm's 2009 Resident Evil comic book series.
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“How do I begin talking about Scrivener? I loaded a trial in August and ten days later had to buy the full licence. In five months I've written a novel, a radio play (my first), two short stories, outlines for two more, and now I've begun plotting another novel. I have never before found anything that is anything like so productive for an author. Scrivener has all the tools I could need, but without restricting my style and forcing me to work in a specific way. I just use the tools I want - and then the whole thing is there in front of me . I am so delighted with it, I've recommended it to all my friends who write. Scrivener for me is now the primary reason for owning an Apple computer. As a writer, it really is that good. It makes my machine sing for me. Fantastic software.”
- Michael Jecks, author of the Templar Series and theæfounder of Medieval Murderers. Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association 2004/5, he is the present UK Chairman of International Thriller Writers.
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“A decade-long PC user, I recently bought a Macbook for the express purpose of writing my next novel on Scrivener. I'm glad I did. I do a lot of research for my novels, and I love having my research documents conveniently filed alongside my writing. I also like the way Scrivener adapts to the way I write--non-chronologically, in fragments that I later piece together. I'm now moving along at a brisk pace, enjoying the flexibility and simplicity of Scrivener.”
- Michelle Richmond, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Fog and No One You Know.
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“I first heard of Scrivener from some other writers, all of whom said it had changed the way they worked. I was hooked in days. It's smart, efficient software that allows you to organize material easily and organically. You can see your chapters. You can see your research. You can even see your corkboard. It's not confusing or glitchy. Finally, someone made good software for writers! And the price is fantastically low so that everyone can afford it, even if you're just getting into writing. It's not a crippling investment. (I'd buy it for ten times that or more. Really.) It works and it's worth it. Get Scrivener and leave the horrors of Word behind forever.”
- Maureen Johnson, author of 13 Little Blue Envelopes and Suite Scarlett.
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“Scrivener is head-and-shoulders above all other Mac applications for
writers (and I say this having tried every one over the past 15 years,
and heavily using several of them). Scrivener is fast, it's reliable,
and it's intuitive. More times than I can count, I have tried to do
something in Scrivener because it seemed logical to me, without knowing
if I could, and been pleased to see the result I expected. Scrivener
makes it easy to keep track of everything that matters -- research
material, notes, multiple versions of drafts -- while forgetting
everything that doesn't. The application doesn't require you to think
like the guy who wrote the software, or require a lot of your attention
to work flawlessly.æIt lets you be yourself.æThe developer is
amazingly attentive and responsive, too. And it costs a fraction of what
its competitors charge.”
- David Berreby, author of Us & Them: The Science of Identity.
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“I've been using Scrivener now for a little over over a year and cannot imagine how I wrote novels without it. It is a paradigm shift from word processors equivalent to the shift from clay tablets to typewriters. It allows for a flexibility and organizational structure that's nonpareil. I (and other writers I've pointed in its direction) can only say thank you for making my work not only more productive but more adaptable to experimentation and flow.”
- Gregory Frost, author of Shadowbridge, Lord Tophet (Del Rey/Random House) and many more books and stories.
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“Scrivener remains my writing tool of choice for day-to-day large projects.”
- Nik Rawlinson, editor of MacUser UK and author of The Independent Guide to the Mac, The Independent Guide to the iPhone, The Ultimate iPod Guide and Apple Aperture 2: A Workflow Guide for Digital Photographers.
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“Sticky notes, manila folders, and 3X5 cards--Rest in Peace. The geniuses at Literature & Latte have created a writing software package that is immensely powerful and extremely affordable. As soon as I downloaded Scrivener, I watched the Tutorial and found myself drooling. Once I started using Scrivener on my next novel, I found myself wondering how I ever wrote a book without Scrivener. Think of a feature you'd like to have with your writing software...seriously...anything that would make the writing process easier. How about having every chapter both separate and part of the whole so that you can move them around with total ease? Or maybe you are an outliner like me and you'd like to see the outline on screen right next to your manuscript. Perhaps you are totally a visual writer; how about being able to drop art and photos into a display window that sits open on the side of your manuscript? And for the ADD writers out there--yeah, I'm one of those--how about a mode that blocks everything else on your desktop and completely focuses you on the page you need to finish? If this sounds good, wait. I haven't even covered a 3rd of what Scrivener can do for you. The beauty of Scrivener is the interface. Everything you could possibly need is right there on the same screen. Because of Scrivener, I am flying through my next manuscript. God bless the folks at Literature & Latte! Now, go download Scrivener for yourself...now.”
- Wayne Thomas Batson, best-selling author of The Door Within Trilogy, Isle of Swords and Isle of Fire.
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“For years, I searched for an app that supports my writing style. I tried them all. If you're a writer, you know that standard word processors just don't cut it. They're either too directive, too bloated, or bog down on long documents. Finally, I found Scrivener, and I've been in love with it since it was a beta. It's now a full-throttle, high-performance beauty, with features that make writing, organizing, rewriting, combining, rearranging, dividing, tracking, editing, annotating, and footnoting easy, intuitive, and yes even fun. I could not recommend Scrivener more highly. When I drive, I drive a BMW because I love its power, its safety, the way it handles the road, and its responsiveness to my every driving need. When I write, I write with Scrivener. Take it for a spin. Put it through its paces. You won't want to write any other way.”
- Tim Hurson, author of Think Better: an innovator's guide to productive thinking.
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“I searched everywhere for a program that would help me organize my manuscript, Creative Awakenings. As an artist, I am a very visual person and I needed the software to serve two purposes, allow for organization as a storyboard (visual) for over 30 pieces of art, and a finalized concrete product I could deliver to my publisher. After researching other programs and starting with MS Word, I was fortunate to stumble upon Scrivener! Scrivener was the perfect software for my needs. I highly recommend this product to anyone seeking a tool to support the organization of their manuscripts and projects. Even my editor was pleased with the end result! I continue to spread the news about Scrivener to everyone I know who writes and works with MAC. Thanks for developing this amazing product.”
- Sheri Gaynor, artist, transformational life coach and author of Creative Awakenings: Envisioning the life of your dreams through art.
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“I wouldn't say Scrivener makes writing a book easy...it just makes
it easier than any other way to go about it. When I was revising my
book, I must have rearranged the chapters, parts of chapters, and
recipes a dozen times. Doing that in a traditional word processor
would have been like eating nails. Plus, Scrivener's full-screen mode
keeps me away from online word games, at least temporarily.”
- Matthew Amster-Burton, author of Hungry Monkey.
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“As a professional copywriter and technical book author, I may not be the "usual creative type" that uses a tool like Scrivener, but I certainly do use it and love how it keeps me organized with all the little research, interview, and drafting/review cycles I undertake. Sometimes I'm putting together a 20-page chapter, and other times a 500-word case study, but either way, Scrivener is up to the task!”
- Thomas Myer, author of Professional CodeIgniter.
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“Scrivener is simply the best way to organize the clouds of my brain. It is the most efficient way to arrange ideas and documents and use them in a long plot.”
- Pierdomenico Baccalario, author of the Ulysses Moore children's saga.
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“I spent months testing different software for authors. Most programs were rigid, too structured. They distracted me from the primary mission - writing my first novel - and turned computer sessions into engineering nightmares. The programs emphasized technology and formulaic patterns, thereby defeating their value as tools.
Then I found Scrivener. There's only a modest learning curve to get started. And the software serves all the core needs of writers. As an outliner, Scrivener organizes your book. It's easy to track events and descriptions. You will never again lose time flipping between pages to confirm whether a character has blue eyes or brown.
As a filing system, Scrivener enables you to save research in the same file as your narrative. No more bushwhacking through cluttered hard drives to uncover buried articles. It's easy to flip between your book and research when confirming details.
As a word processor, Scrivener offers easy-to-use tools: text editor, spell checker, and fonts to name a few. I especially like the export function. It's easy to translate Scrivener files into Microsoft Word - a feature that keeps my publisher happy.
Scrivener is excellent value for the money. Plus, it's a robust platform. I have never lost files or experienced quirky behavior. Scrivener won't write your book. But it will make your time at the computer more productive.”
- Norb Vonnegut, author of Top Producer.
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“I find myself using Scrivener more and more in my writing tasks, from poetry, philosophy, my novels, curriculum outlines, screenplay synopsis, and on and on and on. It took me like a virus. At first I would occasionally cough out a few phrases, then, as I got myself exposed to its features, I would find myself lying quite comfortably in the throes of fever induced by Scrivener's intuitive, clean interface and flow. I actually look forward to using the program (no other program quite has this effect), in fact, I think it has added pleasantly to my own genetic code.”
- Shaun Rudie, founder of Core JKD.
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“I just finished my book. In Scrivener. So, it works. Thank you for a great program.”
- Gertjan Van Dijk, writer and user from the Netherlands.
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