I am now swapping Scrivener for Ulysses
In case you don’t know what the words in the header mean, they are programs/apps for writers. If you don’t know either program then you may find this article rather dull.
I have been plotting a novel for what feels like a decade. An epic fantasy full of rogues and sizzling hot female pirates. I have tried doing it in Word and having all my notes in a separate book, but it all ends up being too chaotic and hard to find specific little things. Five or six years ago I discovered Scrivener and bloody loved it. It was designed for writers working on complicated projects and was therefore ideal for someone trying to write science fiction and fantasy novels, where you are creating entire worlds populated by exotic beasts and peoples. That requires a lot of work and you need to reference things easily. The dream is obviously to be much admired and have obsessive fans nitpick through your work and find inconsistencies which they share with the similarly obsessed – these mistakes obviously need to be at a minimum however, and the file system of Scrivener is superb and intuitive.
It is managing the peripheral notes and ideas that I personally find so difficult when writing something longer. So for the last five years I have loved Scrivener. But like so many writers, the lack of a tablet app has finally proved too much. Especially when I upgraded from an iPad 1 straight to an iPad pro and increasingly write on that. I use Word Online (or whatever it is called) for my writing day job, so tried that while plotting a novel. It is too linear and difficult to skip from section to section and while Onenote is pretty good for plotting I don’t want to write on it or use it in combination with Word. I tried using Evernote (which I use a lot) but while it was great for notes, I don’t like writing at length on it either.
There are some work arounds for Scrivener, like syncing through Simplenote, but it kind of sucked. I needed something that was like Scrivener but wasn’t Scrivener, which made me feel strangely sad and disloyal, but what are you going to do? I did a lot of research and it basically came down to Storyist and Ulysses. Both are similar and probably equally great once you are used to them. My final decision came down to two factors:
1/ Storyist had slightly more negative reviews (as in articles, not the app store).
2/ Ulysses was cheaper.
I am now plotting away on Ulysses and it has been great. It looks and works great on the iPad too. It is a lot simpler that Scrivener but I was never that into doing complicated anyway. I need tabs for things like characters, plots, places and world-building and that’s great on Ulysses. I even drew a map on the iPad and that is now conveniently tucked in as an attachment. Frankly, the more I use Ulysses, the more I like it.
If Scrivener finally releases and iPad app I may be tempted back but it would have to be pretty amazing and it has a lot of catching up to do. Scrivener has been about to launch an app for about 5 years now, and that means a lot of people would have moved on and quite a few who never even started with it. It also doesn’t exactly inspire confidence with updates and new features. Frankly, I’m not holding my breath.
So, sad to say, goodbye Scrivener and hello Ulysses. For now at least.
