Learning Scrivener with Doug Rogers
Yesterday, my colleague Doug Rogers, a brilliant cultural anthropologist at Yale, gave a little tutorial on how he is using the Scrivener software to write his second book. I am always interested in the processes of other scholar-writers.
Doug does his fieldwork in Russia, and his first book, The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals, is an excellent example of a well-written narrative ethnography (the book won honorable mentions for the 2010 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion and for the 2010 Harvard Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies for the best monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in the social sciences.)
Doug is currently finishing up a fellowship year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is working on a project called: “Oil Culture: Producing the New Russia.” It is “a book that charts interactions among oil companies, state agencies, and cultural production in the Perm region of the Russian Urals over the past two decades.” Doug came to the Radcliffe IAS with his research and fieldwork already done. All that was left was putting it all together into a book.
Last fall, Doug started using Scrivener to produce the first draft of his manuscript. He says that the Microsoft Word interface was too familiar. He always found himself tempted to start self-editing when he used it to generate new prose. Psychologically, the Scrivener interface allowed him to just write a first draft without worrying about the syntagmatic or paradigmatic elements of his prose. The idea was just to get all of the relevant information down on the page. He would worry about the stylistics of the writing at a later point.
The main advantage of Scrivener seems to be that it allows you to organize your prose into chapters and subsections within one file. All of this can be easily moved around and rearranged on a side menu without all of the scrolling up and down and cutting and pasting required in a long Microsoft Word document. Scrivener also has a window where you can see all of the footnotes linked to your text off to the side of your document. You have the ability to upload all of your relevant research materials into Scrivener so that they are directly linked to the chapter or subsection for which they will be relevant. Once this is done, you can work in a split screen mode where your text is on top and the research article you need is open on the bottom.
What really impressed me about how Doug was using Scrivener was the way he transferred the organizational structure provided by the software onto the walls of his office. He used Post-It memo sheets to physically map out each of his chapters. When I walked into Doug’s office yesterday, I felt like I was walking into Doug’s book. He has literally surrounded himself with the outline of his book as he writes it. If he ends up moving sections of text around in the manuscript, he can easily rearrange the Post-it sheets on his walls to reflect the new state of a particular chapter.
I am convinced that his visualizing technique provides enhanced mental clarity when dealing with a large body of research that needs to be organized into a coherent narrative. And since Doug also used different colored sheets for different chapters – his book outline doubles as very nice wall art!