I’m not that keen on New Year’s Resolutions – I know it’s nearly the end of February, but please don’t judge me  – they are usually a good idea, but untenable. So, I rarely put much effort into making them – or keeping them.

But when 2018 arrived, I had the nagging feeling that I should be getting to grips with certain aspects of my writing career, so I resolved to fix a few things. I tried not to call them resolutions…

Top of the list was my need to master Scrivener. But it is SO difficult! I’ve talked to people who think it’s the best thing since sliced bread (or whatever the writing equivalent of that is), and I’ve talked to people who wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole (whatever one of those is). And there are even more people who have probably never even heard of it. Scrivener? What?

It’s one of those all singing, all dancing word processing software thingies that will (almost) write your novel for you. Or not.

One of the reasons I gave Scrivener a try a couple of years back is because an author I respect raved about it – and it came with a free trial. And canny are the Scrivener software people because they give you a 30-day free trial – not consecutive days, but cumulative ones. In my case, it took me almost a year to get through half of my free days, then I went mad and actually paid for it (thankfully, it’s not expensive).

The software then sat on my computer for several months before I thought about using it again. I’m tuned into Microsoft Word, which is usually sufficient for most of my writerly needs.

But it’s been niggling me that I haven’t got to grips with Scrivener. Spoiler alert – I still haven’t, but I’m working on it.

There are plenty of on-line tutorials, of course. (Need to know how to boil an egg/do open heart surgery/make playdough/unblock a sink/write a best-seller? Try YouTube.)

But nothing beats getting stuck in and trying to use the software yourself. It has great templates to help you set out a novel, or a script, or short stories. And there are corkboards for notes and research where you can pin videos, pictures or other virtual bits and pieces. You can keep all your research, timelines and character sketches together, and switch effortlessly between scenes and chapters, so what is there not to like about that? You can even get it to monitor your daily output and set word-count goals.

I just can’t quite get it to write the damn book for me. Where am I going wrong?

Just kidding – I’m at about 40,000 words of a new novel (written entirely on Scrivener),  which I have high hopes of a) completing and b) getting published. Oh, and it’s going to win me at least a Booker nomination. And a Costa one. Richard and Judy will love it, so will Oprah, I’ll even get on the Late, Late with it.

Ha, ha! Ever heard of ‘famous last words’?

And you can check out Scrivener for yourself here.