We aren’t at the point—and I don’t want to reach it—where “miracle” AI software writes our stories for us, and we passively absorb them. Sure, AI can output all sorts of text from prompts and prodding, but the human touch remains essential in story shaping.

But some writing software performs brawny labors to structure book-length works: like Scrivener. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction books, Scrivener can take tangled masses of information—character portraits, three-sentence notes, research URLs, images, chapter outlines, chapter drafts, chapters to come—into a coherent layout that not only lets you see what you’ve got, but lets you move everything into ordered arrangements.

I recently published a memoir of my crazed years of teenage shoplifting, and Scrivener was the cop with his hand on my shoulder saying, “Wait a minute, son, let’s put everything back on the right shelf.”

Because the memoir is made of moments from (gulp) 50 years ago, I couldn’t brush aside my brain cobwebs by myself. I needed to question pals and siblings who were around to witness my crimes about certain details. Many, many details rose to the surface, with detail follow-ups. Many, many emails needed re-confirmation, chopping and crafting. Twelve people in all, almost 8,000 words of notes.

But one of Scrivener’s beauties is that I could jump from, say, the notes on my older sister’s recounting of how she saved me from jail (and never told my parents, thanks Colleen) on one occasion, to the chapter where I’d written about that event, and to another chapter much later on related to that event. All without leaving the program, or having to open, shuffle and scroll through multiple chapters in Word, or having to open the draft outline of the book, because the outline was already in Scrivener, all seen at a glance.

You can drag and drop chapter elements (or entire chapters) to reorder the story’s scheme, color-code chapters or other resources according to priority or level of completion, quickly make new resource folders or documents, and keep running word counts of all elements. Scrivener makes a dynamic map of your book, and there are no toll roads.

Well, I’ll take one step back on that: the software does have a learning curve, and there are lots of features I don’t use or haven’t mastered. The compilation functions, which let you output to Word or to ebook formats, have puzzled me at times. But there are YouTube tutorials available to help with the head-scratching.

Scrivener gives you templates for both fiction and nonfiction works, and blank or modestly formatted documents for book elements like front matter and back matter, all of which can be incorporated (or skipped) in the outputs. You can also see a day-by-day writing history (with word counts), for you historians.

Sometimes when writers work on long and intricate projects, the materials can seem like a big, unruly amount of unconnected chunks of information. That can be daunting. Scrivener can collect and assemble all that criminal riffraff into a line-up where you can identify the real suspects.

To this point, I’ve used the software to write the memoir, an essay collection, an article collection, one novel, one other nonfiction book, and a couple of complicated articles, ones with lots of links, pictures and notes. I have the notes queued up in Scrivener right now for what will be either a long short story or a novel.

I don’t suggest shoplifting as the thing that brings you to use Scrivener, but however you arrive, you’ll leave with all your word crimes tidied up.

Bio
Tom Bentley’s newest book is a memoir of his teenage shoplifting business, Sticky Fingers: Confessions of a Marginally Repentant Shoplifter. He is the author of three novels, a short story collection and a how-to book on finding your writer’s voice. He’s published hundreds of freelance pieces in newspapers, magazines, and online. If you’re in the neighborhood, he would like you to pour him a Manhattan right at five. See his other lurid confessions at www.tombentley.com