In Macworld magazine, I read about a great software program for writers called Scrivener. My writer and I have been using Google Docs and MS Word to write and we were reaching a point where this book was getting harder to manage as one long stream of text. We were using Kinko’s online service to print the whole thing out, but working this way, which is a more traditional way, would be time and money consuming. It was also difficult as we didn’t have outlining capabilities in MS Word, or at least hadn’t been able to figure out whatever was available in MS Word.
Enter Scrivener. Wow. What a difference. The software allows writers to separate the work into sections and gives you many different views on the work, whether in corkboard mode or in outline mode. You can then work on the doc section by section which is much more faster for me, and also take a look at the whole doc with the sections assembled to see if it all appears together correctly. The transitions then can be worked on separately, which is fine because my biggest barrier is to just focus on a particular section first and get the text out of my brain.
Then, you can always export the doc into one long Word or text file. The sections get all assembled and you can print it out or send it to a publisher.
The one thing that would have been nice would be to have some collaborative method of working together that doesn’t mean coordinating file versions and passing them back and forth. Perhaps some merge method? Online site support where the files are synced? For now, we’ll email the file back and forth when changes happen.
If you’re writing an article, book, or whatever, I would highly recommend Scrivener!