Word Processing Options

The obvious travel writing software is Microsoft Word or Google Docs, and for Mac users it’s Apple Pages (which can be exported to Word). These are all viable methods for organizing your travel writing and creating your first draft, but if you’re serious about becoming a writer, then I encourage you to invest in Scrivener software.

I wrote and formatted my first travel guide in Word, and it became an organizational nightmare to move content around and attach notes and comments to specific sections, so I switched to Scrivener and I haven’t looked back. It’s revolutionized my content creation, and I use it for writing books, blog posts, and all of my writing projects.

Writing with Scrivener

Scrivener is an amazing, delightful, efficient solution for writing travel guides. For each book segment you can add a synopsis, notes, drag external files or create bookmarks to source files, add keyword and custom metadata, take a snapshot of a version before you edit, and add comments and footnotes. You can also save research content and view your draft as a series of index cards; one continuous text file; or a list of content where the content status and label is visible. This all probably sounds like a foreign language, but Scrivener will simplify your travel guide writing.

It’s tailor made for long manuscripts, and allows you to compose your text in any order, and move sections around effortlessly. You can split your content any way you like. I segment my book into parts and within each part I use a new section for each chapter. For long chapters, you can split these into smaller segments.

When you view your document in Scrivenings Mode, these all display in a combined view. Sections are all easily moved around, so if you haven’t settled on the order of your book’s content before you write, it doesn’t matter; you can just focus on writing and move the sections around later. You can’t do this in Word.

Sure, write your first travel guide in Word, but by book two you’ll have switched to Scrivener anyway. Whereas they developed Word for a multitude of uses and users, Scrivener was developed with writers in mind.

Additional Scrivener Benefits

Another benefit of using Scrivener is that you can download a demo version of the software with all the features, and use it for 30 days total. For example, if you used Scrivener for 1 days a week, you trial would last for 30 weeks. There’s definitely a learning curve to all of the features, but you don’t need to master all of them in order to make Scrivener a good addition to your writing toolkit.

In addition, I switched over from using Grammarly to self-edit my content to ProWriting Aid because of the seamless integration. I can open up any Scrivener file directly in ProWriting Aid and do all of the spelling, grammar and writing checks in ProWriting Aid, without affecting the formatting in Scrivener. This integration is a game-changer when you use Scrivener for all of your writing project, especially books and blog posts.

Here’s a podcast episode I hosted about the benefits of using  Scrivener for non-fiction and fiction.

How Travel Writers Self-Publish Podcast Ep#10: The Benefits of using Scrivener for Non-Fiction AND Fiction

Click here for my other posts about the benefits and uses of Scrivener.

Alternatives to Scrivener

Scrivener isn’t the only writing software on the market, but it’s the only one I’ve used, and I’m a convert. If you want to find out about Scrivener alternatives, type “writing software like scrivener” +alternative into the Google search box.