I’m a new Scrivener user coming over from Word 2013 after 15 years of use. I found it an extremely steep learning curve even after going through the full tutorial.
I started off importing my current manuscript in as separate scenes since that seemed like a cool feature. But after working with it for a while, I realized I do not ever want to work on just one scene, since the others must be referenced frequently to ensure I haven’t missed a detail when adding the next scene. I need to see a lot of text while writing, not just small pieces.
The text formatting is quite frustrating. I feel like I’m just constantly fighting with it to format text the way I want, and may have to leave it alone until it’s done because I’m wasting too much time trying to get it to work right. One of the biggest difficulties is, Scrivener does not apply formatting to a blank line, only if there’s a character present. For instance, several bullets of text, highlight them all to change the font size, it doesn’t stick unless you add a space to each bullet. The formatting should be independent of text as part of the paragraph so it sticks when you make a change.
I wish there was a way to automatically link to character/location files when they come up in the text. I assumed this was the case from perusing the web site before bying. I didn’t suspect when I bought the software that I would have to manually edit every reference of a character or location to hyperlink to it. So, I’ve added a chapter header document (excluded from compile) that includes a list of all characters/locations in the chapter with links from there. It’s manual, and thus time consuming.
A lot of the “stuff” Scrivener does wastes my time when I would rather be writing. A couple times I have nearly quit and switched back to Word.
Fyi, I’m working on a 135k novel and a 2nd one currently at 60k.