Scrivener won’t work for all screenwriters, or even most screenwriters. A program primarily intended for novelists, the screenwriting functionality is an after-the-fact add-on. Three major iterations in and there are still basic formatting issues when exporting a script to PDF. Meanwhile it comes so loaded with tools and features that it requires a major time investment to get the most use out of it. This is not a program for the casual user.
And yet, I keep using Scrivener. The reason? Its outlining capabilities. Scrivener, in my mind, is unmatched when it comes to building a story. You can figure out the beats as a series of notecards on a bulletin board, or dots on a timeline, or entries in an outline – or switch back and forth seamlessly between all three. Labelling and color-coding further lets you manage the information in an easy to grasp fashion.
Plus, because of the way it organizes sections of your script, your outline can be as granular as you need. Those notecards can represent acts or sequences or scenes or beats in a scene. And when you write, the section you’re working on stays attached to that notecard, moving around with it. So long as you keep them in order, Scrivener will stitch it all together into one script at the end.
Now, again, I have to caution that Scrivener’s script formatting is not ideal. My process involves exporting the draft and cleaning it up in Fade In or another screenwriting-focused application. But in my experience no other software comes close to letting me so directly translate my thoughts into an outline. And for that, it’s worth the effort.