A Writer’s Journey: Moving from Scrivener to Obsidian with Claude for Creative Freedom

Two years ago, I started on an Alternative History series set in the American Colonial era. After completing two of the books and running into a roadblock on hiring a cover creation, I took a hiatus. I explored creating a cross-platform alternative to Scrivener, and I created a web application for my writing. Here we are, 23 months from when I started with the series. I have picked it up again.

How hard is it to re-start after a few years? Whelming, but not overwhelming. I wrote it in Scrivener and kept decent notes as I went. I used the Snowflake method to create the plot. Writers use Ingermanson's Snowflake Method to grow a simple idea into a structured novel. The process starts with a one-sentence summary that becomes a brief paragraph defining the story's major points. Writers then flesh out characters and shape scenes. Step by step, this method adds detail until the writer holds a coherent plan for the entire book. I've used it for years.

But my characters have taken stories in different directions. You will see this with Sean Gunn in the second book. I had no idea he would do what he did in the second half of his story. I thought he was far too mercenary. GPT was new. I used it to create scene summaries after the fact, and of each part as I completed them.

The original idea for this series dates back to 22 June 2018, when we were on vacation. I kept notes in GitHub throughout. For almost 17 years, I've dithered between having my notes in Scrivener or GitHub...or keeping my Scrivener in GitHub. What kept me in Scrivener was the ability to organize. What pushed me away from Scrivener was the (somewhat realized) risk of vendor lock and the inability to cleanly manage multiple books in Scrivener. Some vendor lock occurred when exporting the supporting research.

Enter Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/). A simple WYSIWYG Markdown editor. It scratches my desire for a Wiki without having to run a server or true vendor lock. There are some features (like DataView) that would be challenging to do with a regular editor. And my old tools for converting Markdown to ePUB and PDF work with the structure I'm using.Since I've moved to Linux, some of my vendor solutions are unavailable. But my toolchain is platform agnostic. Obsidian replaces my need for an editor like Visual Code Studio, which I've used. Studio is better suited for code, less so for prose.

For the past two weeks, I've pulled my books out of Scrivener and gotten them into a new GitHub repository using Markdown. I keep the older repository for future ideas. Since Claude AI has a new project feature, I've primed the pump with my older summaries. I'm using Claude to populate the YAML frontmatter for each scene with POV, location and summary. I have to read the scenes to ensure its not hallucenating, because it has, which helps refresh my memory.

Claude is also helping me reverse-create my character synopses; since I use a mix of Snowflake and The Story Equation. For the first time in a decade I have synopses that just feel right (in terms of formatting). I've fed it my older write-ups on the milieu-specific technology and had it rewrite them. Since Scrivener gave me some of my notes in Webarchive format, I used Claude to write a summary of those articles I still needed for the series. I care less if it hallucinates with some of the facts. This is fiction, not nuclear engineering.

I'm mobilizing to start my third book in the series. I earlier said I was going to resume the Fantasy series. After Author Nation and talking to my wife, I want to get this third book done and get them covered. Then I can move on to the Fantasy. Once I finish reviewing the first two books, I will start on the third. My goal is to start writing by 21 December, and finish by 21 February.