One of my resolutions for 2011 was to go paperless at home. This includes all the paper that is involved in the business of writing. For a while now I’ve been pretty good at going paperless with my writing, but today I took it one step further: I started making use of my Kindle for reading my own stuff, as well as stuff that I critique for the Arlington Writers Group.

Scrivener makes this a piece of cake. I pulled up my novel from NaNoWriMo, the first part of which I am cannibalizing for my January novelette, in Scrivener and compiled the document to Kindle format. It filled in a few options (like the Title and Author) and clicked the Compile button, and–bam!–Scrivener turned out a perfect .mobi file which I copied to my Kindle.

Other than providing the author and title as I wanted it to appear, I didn’t have to change a single option. Not only is the story perfectly formatted on my kindle, but a hyperlinked Table of Contents was produced. This will make my life so much easier. You see, while I worked paperless before, I had to be in front of my computer to read my story and make minor edits or notes. Now, I can read it anywhere (even without my Kindle I can still read it on my iPhone) and add notes and highlights. I can’t edit it on the Kindle but that’s not the point. Especially for this story, since I’m keeping the basic premise and characters but doing a complete rewrite so that it reads like a piece of short fiction instead of the first part of a novel.

I am constantly impressed at how easy Scrivener makes tasks like this. And when you think about it, Scrivener almost acts as a personal assistant for writers. It manages my research and notes. It allows me to publish to a variety of formats, and does all of this in a way that is seamless and doesn’t require a lot of work on my part. I really can focus on the writing and not worry about the formatting. It is yet another reason why I couldn’t imagine my life as a writer without Scrivener.

For more about what I have to say on Scrivener, see:

• Scrivener 2.0: My month-long test drive
• Scrivener: the ultimate writer’s tool