I have tried nearly every writing tool available for the Mac and finally stumbled upon one that is, basically, brilliant. I love it. It has replaced every other writing tool in my arsenal. What is it you ask? Literature & Latte’s Scrivener.
The beauty of Scrivener is that it allows you to chop your writing project into pieces, but easily edit and/or print them as a whole. So you can focus on a scene in a chapter, or a page in a comic book script, or whatever, and not have your software experience bogged down by hundreds of other pages of stuff you’ve written.
The real magic, though, is that at its heart, Scrivener is a giant container. I am a horribly disorganized writer. I have drafts and versions and all kinds of stuff littered all over my hard drive. But with Scrivener you can create folders or pieces of text that are outside the manuscript you’re working on and include pretty much anything. So for Resident Evil, I have six scripts, multiple drafts of each script, and tons of notes and research material, all contained in ONE DOCUMENT! And if you delete a file from within Scrivener, it goes into an internal garbage can, so it isn’t truly lost, just out of your way. You can paste any kind of copy or html, pictures, you can even suck in web pages for offline use as reference material.
The only feature I’d like to see implemented is a tabbed interface, like in Firefox, so you can have multiple docs open and quickly accessible. I have a few small other gripes, but honestly, compared to every other writing app, this one is The King. I love it. I could never have completed the manuscript for my novel without it.
Go over to Literature & Latte and try Scrivener. It has a free trial. Worth the effort.
And if you want to use it to write a comic book, here is my template for doing so.