Scrivener

Note cards and folders let a book's structure emerge bottom-up. For Wonderland, Steven Johnson dropped quotes into Scrivener as atomic notes and dragged related ones into folders, such as a robotics and music cluster. When a pile grew big enough he merged it into one document and treated it as a chapter.

For Where Good Ideas Come From, his first plan of chapters by scale (brain, workspace, city) left each chapter siloed, and moving note cards around showed him the real patterns. His reaction when a pile matured: "all right that's a chapter."

How I Write▶ 1:18:20

Movable sections make restructuring a book cheap enough to try often. Mark Manson drafts in Scrivener because moving chapter 6 to chapter 2 takes minutes, where in Word or Google Docs it costs about three hours of cutting and pasting. Tim Ferriss uses it to drag two sections past each other, read the flow, and revert in two seconds.

Ferriss keeps research in documents below the chapter he is writing. Manson moves to Word to polish once the book is roughly in order, because Scrivener's formatting tools are weaker and publishing runs on Word: "in word or Google Docs you'll spend three hours cutting and copying and pasting and moving stuff around."

How I Write

Movable sections make restructuring a book cheap enough to try often. Mark Manson drafts in Scrivener because moving chapter 6 to chapter 2 takes minutes, where in Word or Google Docs it costs about three hours of cutting and pasting. Tim Ferriss uses it to drag two sections past each other, read the flow, and revert in two seconds.

Ferriss keeps research in documents below the chapter he is writing. Manson moves to Word to polish once the book is roughly in order, because Scrivener's formatting tools are weaker and publishing runs on Word: "in word or Google Docs you'll spend three hours cutting and copying and pasting and moving stuff around."

How I Write▶ 31:30

Folders of raw material show writers where their research is thin. Jimmy Soni kept notes and fragments in one Scrivener folder per year of his chronological book, and a thin 2001 folder told him he had "phoned it in" on that period. He produced about 470,000 words of raw material and cut it to roughly 170,000 for The Founders.

To start a chapter he copied a folder's material, about 9,000 words, into a Google Doc and sculpted it toward about 5,500, making writing subtraction: "that's how I avoid the demon of the blinking cursor, the blank page." Scrivener's word tracker turns from red to green at his daily count, and he calls the app "Microsoft Word sent to the gym for 5 years."

How I Write▶ 29:47