Sophie Cooke

Author of Under the Mountain, The Glass House, and Dragana Savic.

Scrivener has revolutionised my working day. Instead of scrabbling around in piles of paper, with sixteen different windows open on my screen, I now have everything I need in one aesthetically pleasing place. I love being able to store all my research — web pages, photos, PDFs, whatever — in the same project file as my work in progress. The split-screen facility enables you to glance across at research documents while you type (and to easily leaf through these). It works because it’s so intuitive: a computerised version of the typewriter surrounded by cuttings. My desk is immeasurably tidier since I got a Mac and started using Scrivener, and I find that I work far faster too. In the 2 years I’ve had Scrivener, I’ve written 1 complete novel, 8 short stories, and several articles, with countless other projects in the pipeline. It helps organise my thoughts as well as my papers.