The seventh Costa book is just about finished and will turn out to be the first novel I’ve ever produced that has never been edited in Microsoft Word. Yes, it will get turned over to the old beast at the close of the process. Publishers use Word as their de facto standard for the publishing process these days, and anyone who wants to wean them of that habit is surely in for a nasty shock along the way. Writers tend to get very fixed and silly ideas about using word processors. One habit that is still shockingly current is the notion that books must be written double-spaced.

I will never be able to say this sufficiently loudly. Books must certainly be delivered double spaced, and in a nice clean font (though not necessarily Courier - Helvetica or my preferred substitute, Optima) is fine. But the fact they need to be printed out like that for an editor does not mean you have to write them that way. Double spacing on screen means half the space there is wasted. Repetitive word usage and other obvious errors become much more difficult to spot. I have written in 1.5 leading for donkey’s years and just flick the leading to double to print for the final submitted copy. What other way is there to work?

Still, like I said… fixed ideas. And one of them is that Word is the only way to write, or indeed, as one author said to me not long ago, your choice of software doesn’t really matter at all. It’s a tool, and that’s true. But, while I don’t think software will, as the ads used to promise, ‘unlock your creativity’ one day, I prefer good tools to mediocre ones. Word is competent but overly complex, sluggish if you’re on an Intel Mac, and rotten at both outlining and smart find functions (for example, show me every chapter in a story where a certain character appears). There ought to be something better, and the good news is that, for a modest $35 or so (soon to rise to $39), there is.

It’s called Scrivener, it only runs on the Mac, and if that still hasn’t put you off you can go and download a trial copy here. Instead of explaining why I love this software perhaps I should simply point you to the screenshot here. This is the ‘binder’ in Scrivener, a simple yet sophisticated outlining tool that contains the entire seventh Costa book, all 128,000 words of it.

As you can see the book is divided into seven distinct sections. I’ve left the top one, the folder, open so you can see that each of those is carved up into different chapters. They could be further broken down into scenes if you liked. ‘Kate’s notes’ and ‘Maria’s notes’ are the editing notes provided by my two lovely editors, one in New York one in London, to the initial draft. Were I to open up the other folders you could see the breakdown of the entire story (which is why I won’t, thank you kindly). In the research folder you can store pictures, pdfs, even Quicktime movies if you wanted them. There’s a trash folder for dumping stuff without deleting it. Plus I set up an outtakes folder which is where I place unwanted chapters that stay out of the main story structure but don’t get entirely deleted.

Do you get the picture? This is the way I’ve always, unconsciously, wanted to work. Each story is broken down to a bunch of fragments. You can work on one scene individually. Or you can select it with those around it and see them as a single document (called, for some odd reason, a ’scrivening’ - the lingo takes a little learning). Anything else? Well yes. You can make notes on the entire project, or on its individual components. See the screenshot above? This is the component note area. There’s a synopsis which you can write or simply have created automatically from the opening text. You can give things labels, status marks and decide whether you want them exported. Plus you can add notes. It beats Word’s awkward little note insertion feature hands down, and it’s dead easy to use.

There’s a lot more to Scrivener than this. For example, you can blow the editing screen up to occupy the whole monitor and forget about the rest of the world. There’s also a rudimentary screenwriting facility and some toys I haven’t quite got the hang of yet. But it works, and it’s a sight more secure than Word too. Every file it creates is actually a package of the document’s different parts - each chapter or scene is an individual .rtf file for example. So even the chances of an entire file going corrupt seem to be zero - at the very least you could recreate the original text. Not that I’ve seen any serious signs of bugs. It just works, quickly and easily.

And when you’re done? You export the whole lot to Word and send it off to your unsuspecting editor. Even that’s smart. Remember, writing and exporting are entirely separate. I write in 1.5 leading. I export in double space (and to a different font entirely if I want). You don’t even have to mess around with style any more.

Once I’d done the first draft I thought that would be the end of Scrivener and I’d go back to Word for the revise edit as I used to. But the funny thing is I’m so hooked I don’t even bother with that. The revise is happening in this inexpensive little marvel too, and I’ve notes for other projects already.

If you’re a Mac user and write, I suggest you give the trial download a serious try. I’ve seen any number of so-called word processors for authors over the years. This is the first one to eschew the gimmicks and give us good, straight sensible easy-to-use features and innovation. And the best news of all? I very much doubt I’ll be buying that new version of Word for Intel Macs which Microsoft have just announced is being delayed to next year, missing its release date by several months.

Free of daft unnecessary features, happily shorn of ambitions ever to do mailmerge or other arcane acts, Scrivener is the work of one lone Brit called Keith who wanted a better tool for his writing. Well done, mate. Now get on with your book.