I'm now four days into <a href="http://www.davidhewson.com/2009/11/a-new-book-for-old/">the rewrite of my first novel from fifteen years ago, </a><em><a href="http://www.davidhewson.com/2009/11/a-new-book-for-old/">Semana Santa</a></em><em>.</em> As I've said here before, this is a substantial revision, not just a few changes here and there. I'm reimagining the book from scratch, in a way I could never do with something I've just written. It's an interesting exercise, not least because, for the first time in ages, I'm not writing in Scrivener. The whole of the revision process will take place in something I use very rarely, usually for writing the odd letter: a word processor.

Why?

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Because you need to choose the right tool for the job. Scrivener is fantastic for building a book from scratch. By dividing a manuscript into sections and scenes it gives me the freedom to move around elements as I see fit, changing the timeline, watching how the balance of the narrative shifts if I juggle the different parts in the story.

I don't need to do that with this revision. The basic storyline will stay the same. What will change will be additions and deletions. I'm principally editing and writing <em>in situ.</em> I could do that in Scrivener if I wanted. But it's really better handled in a word processor. In this case Apple's own Pages, a very competent word processor, much better than Microsoft Word I think, though that's how the manuscript will appear in the end.

When I'm editing I want to be able to do a number of things that aren't much needed in the original burst of creativity that produces the initial draft manuscript.<img style="padding-left:4px;float:right;" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Screen-shot-2009-12-08-at-09.04.34.png" alt="Screen shot 2009-12-08 at 09.04.34.png" width="189" height="257" />

I need to be able to find things very quickly, throughout the breadth of the document. Word is appalling at this. It simply bounces you from one instance of a word to the next, so you have to sift through all 133,000 words, in this case, looking for the one you want. Like Scrivener, Pages is smarter. Bring up the search window, type in a term and you get every instance of a word instantly, in context, as you see here. This is how search is supposed to be in the 21st century.

I want to be able to comment on parts of the document, reminding myself that I need to come back and do more work or check something. Again, a piece of cake -- insert a comment and you get a simple note in the margin which you can hide if you want.
<img src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Screen-shot-2009-12-08-at-09.08.13.png" alt="Screen shot 2009-12-08 at 09.08.13.png" width="467" height="91" />

You can make notes in Scrivener too. But I'm in a different mindset when I'm revising like this. In a way I'm almost like an external editor for a book by someone else. I'm not trying to change it fundamentally, but subtly. Somehow a word processor makes more sense.

I also want to keep track of what I'm changing. As a matter of course I do not work on the original manuscript file -- that's stored safely as a backup, and consulted when needed. But Pages has a simple and easily-understood method of tracking changes as you work on a document (so has Word but I've never managed to understand it).<a href="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/revise1.jpg"><img style="float:right;padding-left:4px;" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/revise-tm.jpg" alt="revise.jpg" width="250" height="351" /></a>

This is more easily seen than explained. If you click on the thumbnail on the right you will get an actual page from the manuscript. You can see that, when I change something, a bar appears in the margin at the point of the change. New text appears in a slightly different colour. These visual keys make it incredibly easy to whizz through the text and see what has changed and what hasn't (and since I'm tracking changes, the original deleted text is still there if I want to return to it -- which is rare).

I like Pages a lot. <em>The Garden of Evil</em> was written entirely using it -- before I discovered Scrivener. Its principal failings are the lack of any powerful outlining features and the ability to divide a book into manageable, separate-but-connected scenes. I don't think I could ever go back to a system where I'm unable to see precisely how long a particular scene is, or the date on which I edited it. So for creative writing Scrivener is definitely home, and for normal revision too. As long as there's a prospect that the order of a narrative will change I will want Scrivener's incredibly powerful ability to shift timelines readily at hand.

But as I said... pick the right tool for the job. Pages fits the bill for this perfectly. It's fast, simple and powerful.