Literature & Latte has released Scrivener 3 for Windows.
I wish I were as good at authoring as I am at editing—or at reading. I can write decently, stringing together sentences and paragraphs well, but I’ve never been able to sustain that in order to come anywhere close to producing a good short story, let alone a book.
One thing I do know is that the best writing tool I’ve ever seen is Scrivener. It takes all of the single-document compositional tools of well-known word processors such as Word and corrects all of the mistakes they make.
Libre-Office’s Writer application is arguably as good as Word—some might like it more, others not as much—and it certainly wins out on price, given that it’s free, but it also takes a single-document approach to composition.
Using a topic-based approach, Scrivener organizes documents into small sections. For example, a chapter in a book can be represented by a folder, and each scene within that chapter is its own single-document entry. Chapters and scenes can be dragged and dropped at will from one location to another, enabling you to easily restructure anything you’re writing without affecting any of the content itself.
Standard word processors do let you set so-called levels on pieces of text and perform a similar kind of drag and drop to rearrange those pieces. However, Scrivener makes this far simpler.
Focusing on single logical sections of text to the exclusion of others and being able to rearrange them without any struggle at all is the main design goal of Scrivener. It’s not just an additional capability, it’s the reason for its existence.
There is simply no comparison between Scrivener and any of the well-known word processors when it comes to the strategic planning and organization of what you’re writing.
Although I still bemoan my own lack of ability as the kind of professional author I would like to be, I have championed Scrivener as the best tool for writers for years now, and I will continue to do so. I should mention that it is also available for macOS and iOS.
If reading this has piqued your interest in any way, I highly recommend visiting the site and checking it out.