Scrivener Review

Much of what I know about writing processes I learned from Bryan Garner in his great book, “Legal Writing in Plain English.” In that book, Garner states that there are four stages to good writing: (1) mad man; (2) architect; (3) construction worker; and (4) judge.
The mad man stage is about putting ideas on paper in a non-linear fashion. This is where mind mapping (inter-connected thought bubbles that look like a spider web) comes in handy. After mad man is the architect stage, where all those connected ideas are put into a linear outline. Then comes the construction worker, who must follow the architect’s outline by filling in the gaps and making the first draft. Then in the judge phase the writer proofreads the draft.
Garner does an excellent job of showing the writer how to apply a systematic method to writing. Garner posits that what writers often experience as writer’s block is a result of the mind shutting down by being overloaded with the task of having to complete all four of these stages simultaneously. Nevertheless, many times knowledge is not enough to our success, regardless of the endeavor. We must try to draw a line between what we know and what we actually do. Many of us feel an obsessive need to just get it out on paper. Until we see it on paper, we feel an irrational fear that we’ll never get started and, of course, never finish our writing projects.
As a person who takes pride in his writing, I always felt a pang of indignation whenever an old boss of mine would request that I just “rough it out.” Still, many times, especially when working on complex projects, I feel a need to just put pen to paper and start writing; mad man and architect stages be damned! Of course, many times I begin legal writing by doing exhaustive research, which usually gets those “mad man” juices flowing despite my neglecting to do a mind map.
For my lastest legal brief, I used the Scrivener program by Literature and Latte, and I must say that I really like it. When using Scrivener, all research material as well as the draft is kept in a single file and in the binder, which is simply a table of contents in the file’s left margin. For each section of the document, there is a new entry in the table of contents and for each entry, there is a plain text file in the main window. The benefit here is that you can move these separate bits of text simply by clicking and dragging the entry in the table of contents to where you want it.
The end result is basically that you can break down your writing project into its separate and discrete parts. And you can very easily move the different parts to change the structure of your draft as you see fit. When you’re finished, you can “compose” the separate text files into a single document and export it in whatever format you like.

You can also keep your research in the binder, so you can access your source material easily while you write and its kept altogether with your draft. This might seem to not be anything groundbreaking. And it's not really. But at the same time, Scrivener seems to strike the perfect balance between maintaining flexibility in your writing while giving the writer the ability to satify the urge to just “get it down on paper.”
As Garner states, the real danger in jumping ahead to the construction worker stage before going through the mad man and architect steps is that you become wedded to the structure you adopt for a piece of writing once you start putting it in linear order, even though that structure may not be the most effective one for getting your points across. By putting text in separate files and giving the writer the flexibility to easily change the structure (even more easily than cutting a paragraph at the bottom of a document and pasting it at the top in Microsoft Word), Scrivener may help the writer from becoming too wedded to a linear order before picking the most effective one.
Moreover, Scrivener’s emphasis on putting down your structure first in the binder section into a table of contents gets you thinking about structure from the start. It also gets the writer in the good (and often under-used) technique of using headings to break the text in your document down into as small of parts as possible.
In today’s fast-paced environment where everyone is “multi-tasking” by checking email, Facebook feeds, and news articles at the same time, the writer no longer has the luxury of writing never-ending blocks of prose. If the modern writer has any chance of getting the message across as a whole, he or she now must break down every thought into digestable bits of information. If not, today’s reader will just give up.