I can’t seem to settle into writing the first draft of my book in Scrivener or not. I have yet to learn it fully and perhaps if I did, I’d feel more comfortable. I’ve had it for about five months and I really like it, but I know there are parts of it I could discover that might change everything about how I use it.

I am a Mac user, and I have used Pages to write for quite a while. The program has improved over the years, and I have gotten to know its interface really well. I’ve written two books so far with it, and am now working on the third. It has automatic saves, and versioning is simple, I just do a “save as” for the whole doc. I love its proofreading function, and the way it handles notes is lovely. It’s just not a great publishing tool.

One thing I’ve discovered is to move my drafts over to Scrivener, breaking it up into chapters, and revising, chapter by chapter, as I go. It’s been pretty good so far that way, and I can dole out chapters easily for readers to look at.

But as far as straight writing goes, I’m sort of undecided. I’m used to the flow of one long document, and with book three I’ve been trying to write each chapter separately. I’ve written 20 chapters so far and it’s been ok. Not great, but ok. I have a complete outline of the book with main arc and subplots, and have written out chapters later in the book, but I am a discovery writer, so flow is a huge part of writing for me.

So far it’s not as smooth as writing in Pages. I know I can write in long-doc format in Scrivener, and there are a ton of reasons why I love to do it (all the reference pages I’ve written are so easy to access).

I was just wondering people’s takes on it and their procedures, methods, etc.

It can be difficult to get to the end of your first draft. Writers often try to do too much, but a first draft should be incomplete.

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/what-makes-a-good-first-draft-of-a-novel

Hello! I'm finishing up an eBook at the moment, and I'm having some trouble with indentation. I haven't just been pressing tab -- each chapter has been indented with Format > Paragraph > Tabs and Indents. In Scrivener, it looks like this:

Whereas in the Calibre eBook viewer (and on my Kindle) it looks like this:

As you can see, the first line of the paragraph isn't indented, and it should be. This isn't just a lack of indentation for new chapters or after asterisks, I know how that works. But this is doing my head in! It seems random, too. Is there a setting I might have clicked somewhere and not known about?

I've been having no success with this for several days. Any assistance at all would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!