You’re trying to juggle a dozen things at once – an unforgettable first line, a fresh voice, an original theme, complex characters, mood and tone and conflict and a sense of mystery, and so on and so forth. In so doing, there’s a good chance you’ve inadvertently lost the most important element of all – clarity. 

Triage. I didn’t come up with this myself. I heard it from the editor Sol Stein, who likens revision to battlefield triage - treating patients in priority order, not first come first serve. For a book, this means tackling the big stuff first. The stuff that is most likely to make a huge overarching impact on the book. 

We’re talking about things like character arc, plot, point-of-view, entirely new scenes...

If you just need a tool to organize a long document, you can change your life in a couple of minutes. Totally worth the investment, even if you never take advantage of all the bells and whistles.

One of my clients is in dire need of organizing a seriously complicated project, so I made these quick screencasts to show him how I use it and how to get started. They’re nothing pretty, but they’ll let you see if Scrivener might help you.