Welcome Beth Revis to If you give a Girl a Pen! She is our guest blogger for this lovely Wednesday!

When I was a spry young thing (I’m 27 now, ancient, I know), I used to
imagine that authors only wrote a large oak desks, with a fountain
pen, and they’d peruse their manuscripts page by page, making little
notes on semi-colons and apostrophes.

I recently completed a MG manuscript, and trust me, it wasn’t the
semi-colons and apostrophes that needed work. It was the plot. The structure, the voice–the
big stuff. I needed something better than a fountain pen.

So I turned to technology. While some of the programs and methods I’ve
used before can be found on my blog here
and here,
today I’m going to talk about Scrivener,
a writing program that I found particularly useful in revising my
manuscript.

Scrivener was developed by a writer for writers. And before we go any
further, I should point out that Scrivener works only for Apple
computers–but an equivalent program, PageFour,
is available for PC computer users.

So, I had a manuscript done. In the past when this happened, I’d hit
print, then I looked at the pages, much like my dreamt-of image of an
author. But that just wasn’t efficient. First, I knew I needed to cut
down the manuscript by about 10k words. Second, I really needed to
focus on structure and pace. And all of that would have meant a lot of
flipping through pages, going back and forth, etc., etc. So, I
transferred the manuscript from Word to Scrivener.

Here’s why: Scrivener is designed for books. You can split chapters up
and click on them to go directly to each chapter. So if I’m in Chapter
1, reading away, and I wonder if I remembered to put that clue in
Chapter 21, all I have to do is click and bam! I’m in Chapter 21. OK, checked it, back to
Chapter 1–in just a click. It’s that simple.

Did you have to research something in your novel? There’s a space for
that–and now you can easily click between your manuscript and your
research without opening other programs, waiting for them to load,
clicking through them on the task bar, etc. Everything you need to
write is right there.

But even better than that is the notecard function. With each chapter,
you can write a short note or synopsis on a virtual notecard attached
to the chapter. Then, you can click on the Corkboard function and look
at all your notecards lined up in a row. If you are one of those
writers with Post-it Note boards or real-life corkboard, consider
going virtual with this program–it’s a lot less messy, trust me!

Of
course, I’m not a corkboard kind of girl…but I did use Scrivener’s
Corkboard. Remember when I told you I needed to cut about 10k from my
manuscript? Once I had all my virtual notecards lined up (in a process
that took maybe half an hour from start to finish–real notecards can
take me days)–anyway, once they were all there, I could easily see
where I had a whole chapter that didn’t progress the plot and two
short chapters that could be combined. Boom. Cutting 10k words has
never been easier.

And I had all those structure problems, remember? Seeing the book laid
out in Corkboard or Outliner mode with Scrivener helped me see those
plot holes and the ways I needed to restructure my plot.

Bottom Line: I had two options
in revising. 1. Print all my pages, read through them, flip back and
forth through manual pages, lug them around everywhere, and hope I
caught everything OR 2. Put
my manuscript into Scrivener and let it format it in ways that helped
me see the problems I needed to fix.

Bio: Beth Revis runs a blog on
writing for MG and YA audience called Writing it Out. She is the
author of a MG fantasy for which she is currently seeking
representation. Beth can be found online at bethrevis.com.

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