Later, as ideas accumulate, she transfers all of these pieces of paper into a ring-binder, where she is still free to move pages around. Eventually an order emerges and she repins them. She talks of how she writes down early ideas on pieces of paper and index cards and pins them to a cork notice-board, not yet knowing where they fit.

There’s a wonderful passage in The Agony and the Ego, a book of essays by writers on writing, in which author Hilary Mantel describes her writing process. Where a word processor’s tools focus mostly on presentation, Scrivener’s tools focus mostly on content. So in the same way that Microsoft Word and its ilk used software to revolutionise typewriting, Scrivener brings together such tools and integrates them with the writing process in new ways that are not possible in the analogue world. As such, they do not incorporate tools that are the staples of many writers of books and other long texts-index cards, corkboards, notes, outlines, research materials. Word processors are chiefly concerned with the typing and presentation of documents, however. As a result, we no longer have to whip out the Tippex whenever we make a typo, and we don’t have to retype an entire page to fix a paragraph. It might not be able to help with finding a fresh take on a topic or turning the perfect phrase, but it removes some of the friction from the physical act of writing. People wrote and typed brilliant works of art before the word processor came along-but the word processor made the process easier. That’s what good software does: it takes the things we do and gives us more control over them, or combines them in new and useful ways. And yet, at some point during the evolution of the word processor, someone looked at a typewriter and thought, What if I could undo my mistakes? What if I could delete words and lines and paragraphs? What if I could insert that missed word? Word processors such as Word are so ubiquitous that we tend to think of them as little more than digital paper, giving little thought these days to the advantages they bring over paper and ink. You don’t need Scrivener-but then again, you don’t need Word, either. One of the first questions some writers ask when they hear about Scrivener is this: “Why do I need specialised writing software to write my book? I can just use Microsoft Word like most writers!” This is true.

Scrivener by Ana Maria Trigo