Margaret Lazarus Dean

Author of The Time It Takes to Fall.

A writer friend recommended Scrivener months ago, and I didn’t listen. When he told me it was not a word processor but a program specifically for writers, I’m afraid I imagined cheesy brainstorming tools and templates, the sorts of things real working writers don’t have time for and find intrusive. So I ignored him. I continued cobbling together messy folders all over my desktop and wasting precious writing time clicking through old drafts and notes, running searches on multiple documents, and struggling to maintain order among my re-ordered and re-numbered chapters.

It’s hard to describe the experience of discovering Scrivener. Suffice it to say that I wish I could e-mail it to myself five years ago and get back all the hours of my youth I wasted NOT using it. In short: it’s a relief to finally find a piece of software constructed with the ingenuity and elegance writers strive for in their own work.