I use Microsoft Word 365 for short stories, as it’s a very quick/snappy program and you can easily access the files/work on the story via web browser. It’s easy to open up and start typing, and it’s grammar/spelling checker is powerful. It has built in text-to-speech, which I use as part of my revising process (hearing the words out loud helps you notice errors/issues you might not with only reading it). And, since it’s the industry standard, I know I will have no issues working with track changes when editors send me back changes.
Word also seamlessly integrates with OneDrive, so my files are always automatically being saved/backed up, I can reference documents on my phone, and I can submit or work on my stories on any computer. The amount of storage you get with OneDrive is more than and a cheaper price than what you’d get on DropBox or similar services…and you get all of the Office software, too. Yes, it’s a monthly subscription, but if you’re planning on paying for cloud storage anyways, there’s no reason not to use it.
I wrote my first novel on Word, and it was all well and good, until I got to about 120K words, and then the poor thing slowed to a crawl. And when I got to the revising stage, I needed to re-order scenes and chapters, and there was no easy way to do that. It was also impossible to get a “birds eye” view of everything or navigate quickly unless you build a table of contents and use H1 tags, and that’s a level of technical detail that isn’t natural to think about and can get in the way of writing. There also isn’t a way to label a scene/chapter that is set in a specific city or is a fight scene, you just have to sorta…remember that yourself.
All of these things is why I write novels in Scrivener now. If you’ve ever used an IDE like VS Code, then the structure/organization will feel very familiar for you. You do have to manually “tag” scenes/chapters with characters/settings/etc, but it can make your revising MUCH easier. But the spell checker baked into it is worse than the one Word had in 2009, and there is absolutely no grammar checker. So you’re going to need to export your novel into something like Word to do that, which is a pain. The compiler can be fiddly, but you are only ever going to need to use that once or twice per novel, so it’s not terrible.
But the three biggest issues I really have with Scrivener is:
1: It’s own file structure is terrible. Each scene and its supporting meta data is a separate RTF file, which is in various folders, but it’s impossible to tell which is what, so if you want to access any of this from a computer that doesn’t have Scrivener on it, well, good luck! Instead of a single, sensible file that it all exists in, you will have a folder called My Great Novel.scriv that is full of folders and a file called My Great Novel, and that’s what you need to click to open this. This means it does NOT play well with any sort of cloud storage, so it is difficult to work on a single project across multiple computers.
2. It is soooooooo slow. There is absolutely zero reason to open up this monster for a short story, and getting word counts for a whole project can take about a minute to calculate. It’s ridiculous. The actual moving of parts of a project within itself is trivial, but asking it to display multiple scenes together on one screen will take it a hot minute. It’s an issue with the program, not your computer.
3. The cost. I know there’s people that would rather pay a higher upfront cost than a continuous subscription cost, but Scrivener is ONLY for writing, and ONLY really usable for big projects. If you plan to write maybe one novel ever and you’re not made of money, then you should probably avoid it. But if you want to write multiple novels during your writing career, then try the 30 day demo.
Since I write both longer and shorter works, I use both Word and Scrivener. But I know people who use other things, based on the kind of software they’re used to using, the types of projects they work on, and the level of formatting they use for stories. Like I know people who use actual programming IDEs to write stories because of the organizational structure and using GitHub for storage…but if you’re not a programmer, that’s not very intuitive, plus there’s really no way to do things like indent first paragraphs automatically, which is a big deal if you want to professionally publish your work (they do not want tabs, and you do not want to go and manually fix that for 500 pages).
But if you don’t have any issues or friction points with your current workflow, don’t worry too much about it.