Well, I have given Scrivener a good go. And I love it. I wish I had had it from the beginning of my WIP.
Firstly the tutorial is really thorough and easy to follow. I was a little overwhelmed, wondering how I would ever remember it all. But, you can go back to the tutorial as many times as you like, which is great.
Scrivener has soooooo many features I like.
I particularly like having everything in the one spot and all easily accessible.
The corkboard feature is great – with a synopsis of each scene and chapter.
One of the cool things is a character and place template. I haven’t used either of them, but I can see how, in the planning stages, they would be just fabulous.
One of my biggest issues when writing is the temptation to edit, over and over again. With Scrivener, because it is all chopped into scenes, that temptation is reduced. I can just re-read over that scene and keep writing, instead of being tempted to trawl through pages and pages. And, because the scenes all have names and a synopsis in the ‘inspector’ panel, I can easily see where I am up to, without having to re-read. This has meant that I have written far more each time I have opened my WIP, than I have in the past. Definite bonus.
It is also great when you need to check on something, say, what a character did or didn’t do in chapter two, you can just go straight there, and not have to scroll and scroll to the right bit. I love this. This also helps with the timeline factor – it’s so easy to double check when you wrote something happened and avoid time consuming mistakes further on.
When actually writing, the ‘compose’ button allows you to write in a blank space and keeps the cursor in the middle of the page, so there is no scrolling, page breaks etc. Lovely.
In the outline option, there is the ability to designate a word count target. I haven’t used that yet, but I like the idea of it 
There really is just so many cool functions available to use, many of which I have not played with yet, but which are all there if I need them.
I will definitely be buying the full version, and, no, I have no affinity with the company
Whilst, obviously, a manuscript can be written without any such fancy program, having everything in one place, with the ability to then ‘compile’ it all together into whatever format you like, I can see will be a huge time saver when I come to the end and am ready to start sending it out.
I love it.
