The queue for coffee comes and goes, there is no rhyme to it. Each time I look up it seems to have assumed a different form. Now it is loosely assembled past the cakes and heading towards the main door. At the back of the queue a short man, stout, his bald head uncovered despite the cold looks at his phone. All the people in the queue are looking at their phones. The degree of their phone focus directly correlates to their distance away from the barista. Those nearing the display of cakes and breads begin to swing their focus from phone to counter. When the barista greets them, they animate, their faces return to the world.
I have walked here in the cold, bright morning with a deliberate aim – to begin going through the online video tutorials for Scrivener 3. I have used this writing software at least a decade, buying it even before the days of the App Store. To their credit, the developers at Literature & Latte have continued to support their pre-App Store customers and I have not found myself having to buy the software again so that all future interactions have to be through Apple’s App Store environment.
I say I have ‘used’ Scrivener, more accurate would be that I have owned a copy, kept it lovingly up to date. I have been aware that I have only scraped the surface in terms of using its full functionality.
I settle in with my coffee and cinnamon roll. The WiFi is a faff but I get it working. I look at Literature & Latte’s playlist of tutorials – the first five are titled ‘Getting to Know…’ and my heart sinks. I have never been keen on software tutorials – written or video – knowing that I will have to wade through the inevitable pages or minute after minute of detailed tours of the main window or basic concepts. ‘This button closes a window. This one opens it.’ Or ‘A file is where the information is kept, so let’s talk about how you save a file’.
It can be tedious and I have, I confess, in the past given up, instead adopting a ‘try it and see’ approach to the software. This leads to a sort of quick frustration – I am usually trying to create something whilst at the same time trying to learn the software.
The barista comes over and tells me that at 11am they will be observing a minute’s silence. It is Remembrance Day in the UK. There’s a few minutes before 11am and I decide to avoid the first tutorial, instead I sip my coffee. At 11am most people in the cafe fall silent. There’s a couple around the corner who clearly have not understood, they talk animatedly to each other in an Eastern European accent. Opposite me an older woman, elegantly dressed with a small expresso, her face heavy with wrinkles, looks across at them and mouths ‘silence!’; she is clearly torn between telling these people to keep quiet and breaking the silence herself. It is a small daily drama that plays into the current mood of nationalism that hangs like an ignored, unpleasant whiff over the EU vs. UK debacle. Eventually something about the silence around them penetrates their conversation and they move into a sort of bewildered pause. For a moment there is stillness, then the world moves on.
I decide to start with the first tutorial, noting it is only 4 minutes long and I have a coffee and cake to distract me. I am surprised. Within the first minute I learn something new about Scrivener’s main interface. I press on. Each video is short, deliberately designed, I suspect, for the attention span of people whose world is full of online interactions, notifications, quick adverts and messages. The caffeine helps.
Within half an hour I have learned a great deal about Scrivener, far more than I had hoped. Small tips and realisations that will help me with my workflow or, at a more basic level, make my work slightly more pleasurable. Literature & Latte have got this right. The long list of video tutorials may look off-putting, particularly if you like to start at the beginning and work your way through. However they are short and get right to the point. If you want to jump around the topics, that works as well.
They can be found here:
