As a writing tool, I love Scrivener. Unfortunately this comes with some hindrances:

  • Scrivener is not a standard format, so you have to compile and export anything you do to to anything with it.
  • Microsoft Word is a standard format in publishing—obviously people in publishing are a bunch of masochists—but Scrivener’s exports to Word are unstyled.
  • Scrivener’s exports to the .mobi format are barely adequate. Scrivener’s exports to the .epub format are famously incompatible with ebook retailers and need to be cleaned up.
  • Scrivener has no export to InDesign—perhaps to be expected, as InDesign can import Word docs.

What I’m realizing is that I’m going to have to use Scrivener for a first-draft tool only, and then export to Word and finish every work in Word. For someone who loathes Word, that’s a sad prospect.

But what’s more sad is that before I can get going on the Word doc, I have to go through and define all the Styles in the manuscript. And it’s not easy, because the process results in loss of tabs, loss of italicization, loss of any and every special style I defined in my Scrivener manuscript (e.g., styles for text messaging). I have to spend hours going through a novel-length document looking for words and sentences that should be italicized, sentences that should be styled as text messages, and so on. This has me questioning my entire workflow:

Scrivener » Word (garbage)
          » Word (manual cleanup)
          » final delivery formatting app (InDesign/Sigil)

And it’s a huge distraction from writing.