Scrivener vs iA Writer - Which is Better for Blogging?
While I don’t always have a ton of articles published in a week, I usually have quite a few that I am working on at any given time. Each article has its necessary research and different topic areas to organize. It can be challenging to hop from one article to another when you don’t always remember why you were saying something or where an idea came from. I have also learned the hard way too many times, that drafting directly in my blogging tool makes it very easy to lose work through being careless or simply because something goes wrong. Because of all of this I long ago decided that it was better to use a stand alone writing app to draft my articles and then transfer them into Squarespace when they were ready. There are thousands of different tools to choose from out there and it takes a lot of trial and error to find one that works for you. This article is not telling you which one is the best for you, instead I am going over the two that I have found make me organized and productive.
As I have said, there are a lot of options available and I want to let you know how I came to choose between just two of them. For many people, they just want something simple like Google Docs. And Google Docs is great, I use it all the time for many different types of documents. I also use Google Drive almost exclusively to organize all of my documents, not just for my blog, but my entire life. The challenge I find with using any web-based writing tool is that I am just too easily distracted by all the opportunities for doing something else and I quickly fall out of my writing rhythm. When I started looking, I knew I wanted something that was offline and allowed me to focus. If you have Microsoft Office, something like Microsoft Word might be the right tool for you and it can do an amazing amount of things. I find it a little overly complex and honestly, a little too corporate, but it is definitely an option if you like using Microsoft’s tools. A few years ago I started looking for another option, something offline that allowed me to focus on writing and that allowed me to organize my thoughts. I have ended up concentrating on two products that are quite different, but depending on your needs, may be the perfect writing word processor for you, Scrivener and iA Writer. I will go into both of these tools and talk about their positives and negatives and let you know which one I used to draft this article.
Scrivener
I can say for sure that Scrivener was created for people that are writing a novel or a long book. You can break a single document into smaller component parts, move them around, add to them. While you are writing you have one click access to a research section and can change your view to a corkboard layout to see your writing in a different way. I have seen videos of writers using these tools to write scenes which they can then pull together into longer chapters as they move through building their book. I have used the same features, but rather than scenes, I am writing blog posts and have them laid out within the different sections I have on my blog (General, Photography, Travel, Side Notes). It is a great way to organize my work.
There is so much to Scrivener that I never touch though, and one of the reasons that I sometimes feel overwhelmed while I am writing in it. You can track statistics of your writing, manipulate the look and feel to no end, and really build quite complex pieces of writing with embedded footnotes and much much more. When I am writing something that has a lot of research involved, I find it beneficial to be able to imbed the documents and links into the research panel, so that as I am writing I can keep going back to the docs to get information and then move back to my draft. For me, it keeps me a little more focused than writing within a web app or the blogging tool itself and moving between chrome tabs. Plus, you can also have PDFs which you can keep open to where you are reading and you can click back and forth or even have it paneled so that the PDF is open on one side of your screen and your writing is on the other. It feels magical when you are doing it. Scrivener, like I said, can feel complex and I would say this is the biggest downside, though the more you use it, the more you can build it into something that is just for you.
While cheaper than some of the other options, it is not inexpensive with the full license currently costing $79.99 CDN. Still, it is downloadable software and there is no monthly fee which seems to be rarer and rarer these days. Scrivener also has a 30 day trial license that you can use which allows you full access to everything for 30 days of use (Not just 30 calendar days). If any of this sounds appealing to you, give it a try, it might be the perfect tool for your blog as well. Their purchase page is here.
iA Writer
If you were to try and create the exact opposite of Scrivener, you couldn’t do much better than to make iA Writer. While it does have its functionalities, its look and feel is true minimalism. When I want to do some free writing or journaling or even write a little fiction, I almost always go straight to iA Writer. Once you are in a document and typing, everything else on your screen disappears; it is just you and your text. It feels as close to typing on paper as you can get out of a word processor. There is even a typewriter mode, which will make the line you are working on stay in the middle of your screen and as you hit return, the text will continually move up. If even your own writing can distract you, there are two focus modes, one which will highlight just the line you are writing at the moment and the rest of your text will be visible, but a light grey colour or you can have it bring just the paragraph you are working on into focus as well. I haven’t ever felt I needed that, but it might be just right for you.
It is important to know that iA Writer is primarily meant for writing for the web using markdown. If you are not aware, markdown is a bunch of writing syntax that lets you use symbols to annotate parts of text as bold or bulleted or a number of other things. I don’t usually write with markdown because it is so simple to add these things in Squarespace, but I can imagine that if you are wanting to quickly produce blogposts and you know your markdown syntax, this could be incredibly efficient. You can apparently connect iA Writer to a bunch of different publishing tools and you can actually publish straight away when your doc is done. Again I expect for a power user this could be very efficient.
For me iA Writer is about simple, clean design. Now for a long research article, you will not get the same benefits as Scrivener, but until recently, iA Writer had one thing that made it my go to writing app and that is that it had an Android app. This meant that I could write on my computer and then go to my phone or tablet and continue working on it. Unfortunately, at the moment it seems like iA Writer is in a bit of a conflict with Google and so the app is no longer available for download on the app store though you can find it on your regular sideload apk sites. Still without the connection to Google Drive, this is not ideal for me. I believe that Dropbox is still working across devices though if you use it. One huge benefit of iA Writer compared to almost any other word processor is the price. At least on Windows currently, it is available for $29.99. It costs more on Mac for some reason and is available for $49.99. Their purchase page is here.
So I said I would say where I wrote this and well this one is from iA Writer, though I didn’t use the markdown feature. Though I didn’t need to do a lot of research for it. I already have the next article I am going to publish underway in Scrivener, as it does have a fair bit. I should add that I am not getting paid by either of these platforms to promote them (though if they want to send me a cheque…). Let me know if you use either of these applications and if so why?