Try Scrivener for Windows for Long Writing Projects
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Generic Company Place Holder Scrivener for Windows
Books, research proposals, screenplays, and scripts, are all daunting, large-scale writing projects. Most authors don't just run a word processor and bang them out, start to finish, ending up with a complete work. The creative process is often complex, and there is much background research, planning, shuffling and reshuffling of segments, editing and re-editing until the manuscript is done. Mac favorite Scrivener ($40, thirty-day free trial) has a Windows version, recently out of beta, that helps writers compose major projects by breaking them down into manageable bits, organizing research material, and more.
The most important thing Scrivener lets you do is work on your project in segments. There are two views, the corkboard and the outline view, which let you get a bird's-eye view of your segments, reshuffle them, and create new ones as needed. The corkboard represents each of your segments as an index card with a title and a synopsis, while the outline view shows more fields. A third view, called the scrivenings view, lets you see you view all selected segments as one continuous document, to see how they read in sequence.
Scrivener also lets you label your segments with labels such as Scene, Idea, Character Notes, or anything else. You can also assign each segment a status label, such as First Draft, Revised Draft, etc. For even finer-grained categorization, Scrivener lets you assign arbitrary keywords out of a keyword hierarchy you define. You can then search for segments labeled with specific keywords (such as the name of a character), and read them in isolation using scrivenings mode. You can even save your searches for future use.
Once you are ready to share your manuscript, you can export it using Scrivener's powerful compilation functionality. You can make it into a PDF document, an RTF file, an HTML webpage, and more. A simple template engine allows some control over the manuscript's appearance, but Scrivener doesn't try to be a full-fledged typesetting program.
Scrivener for Windows lags behind its Mac counterpart in version numbers and features, but the version I evaluated, 1.2, feels like a mature and powerful product. If you are serious about writing, you should check it out.
--Erez Zukerman
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