Scrivener Active
The long-form writing workshop with a screenplay mode.
At a glance
- Maker
- Literature & Latte (Keith Blount)
- First release
- 2007
- Status
- Active — still developed and sold
- Platforms
- Mac, Windows, iOS
- Pricing
- $59.99 one-time per desktop platform; iOS $23.99
- Native format
- Scrivener (.scriv)
What it is
Scrivener is not a pure screenwriting app — it is a workshop for big messy projects: research, index cards, outlines, drafts, all in one binder. Screenwriters who also write prose, treatments and pitch documents live here, exporting to Fountain or Final Draft when it’s time to share.
What people are saying
The good
Nothing organizes a long, messy project like it, say the users: the binder, corkboard and outliner are named in nearly every recommendation, drafting in pieces and reassembling is called transformative by non-linear writers, and a one-time price for that depth reads as excellent value.
The bad
The learning curve is steeper than newcomers expect, and the Compile export system is a meme-level grievance, with dedicated threads of users near tears over producing a correctly formatted document. Screenwriters specifically warn that typing script pages is not its strength, and the per-platform license (buy Mac and Windows separately) annoys some.
Paraphrased consensus from user reviews, forums and retrospective coverage across the web.
Where it came from
Keith Blount built it for his own unfinished novel; the Mac app landed January 2007, Windows in 2011, iOS in 2016. Its .scriv projects are uncompressed packages of small documents — no cage, which is why rescuing manuscripts out of them is possible.
Worth knowing
The author literally wrote it because no existing tool could hold a whole novel.
Getting scripts in and out
Imports: Fountain (.fountain), Plain text (.txt), Rich Text (.rtf), Word (.docx)
Exports: Fountain (.fountain), PDF (.pdf), Word (.docx), Rich Text (.rtf), Plain text (.txt)