I have imported a novel from Word and divided it into chapters and scenes. I haven’t used the Corkboard yet with this project (and I haven’t yet used the Outliner at all on any project).
Now I want to home in on one character. I thought a good way to start would be to create index cards for each scene he’s in so that I could track his current story arc.
I used Search to pull up a list of all his scenes. Then I began adding index cards for each of those scenes. I can’t, however, find a way of looking at all those index cards together or printing out the cards. Is there a way of looking at these cards all together?
I think it might be a good idea to go through the tutorial (Help > Interactive Tutorial) if you haven’t already, as the way the corkboard and outliner interact with everything else is a major part of Scrivener, so it’s worth familiarising yourself with those concepts. In short, the corkboard and outliner are just views on a container (folder). You select a folder and see its contents laid out on the corkboard (or in the outliner). You can create collections to view arbitrary cards together, though.
This is a fair comment. You would never guess this from the idiot questions I have been asking, but I have worked through the tutorial twice before, and also read Take Control of Scrivener. I just get so overloaded with information, it seems the only way for it to make sense is to try to do something, fail and then get past my frustration enough to work out how to succeed.
I have now gone through the tutorial a third time and thought I understood how to do what I need to do. Unfortunately in trying to do this I have inadvertently moved all the documents selected in the search into the trash (about 25% of the content) and now have to find a way to get them out of the trash and put them back into the project in the proper order. I have no idea what happened and am worried I will be a fool and make the same mistake again at some point. I thought I had taken a snapshot but can’t find that, either.
I do hope that I will eventually get past this feeling of total incompetence and one day master this excellent programme. I can see that it can do so much but I just can’t make it do it. It’s funny. I consider myself reasonably intelligent most of the time but right now I am clearly a complete idiot.
Not at all - there is a bit of a learning curve, but hopefully there will be a moment when it all clicks.
I’m not sure how you managed to get everything into the Trash - the only way you can do that is by clicking on the “Trash” button in the toolbar, by hitting command-delete, or by dragging them to the Trash.
The way to look at Scrivener is this:
• Your project is a ring-binder of files and folders.
• Each piece of paper in there has an index card paper-clipped to it.
• When you open one of those folders, you can either go through the sheets of paper one-by-one, or you can throw all of the index cards onto a corkboard to get an overview (or onto the outliner for that matter).
• The corkboard and outliner therefore basically just allow you to “zoom in” on a particular folder within the project. Just like when you select the Documents folder in the Finder, you see its contents in the pane on the right.
This complicated a little by the fact that each folder can have text associated with it too - there’s not much difference between folders and text documents beyond their icons and the mode in which they open by default. But think of it like this: each of the folders within that ring-binder has a sheet of paper and index card clipped to them, too.
Regarding finding all those documents in the trash: I found two unwanted folders in my search results (because the character’s name appeared in the folder). So I dragged one of those folders to the trash. Big mistake, evidently, because everything else disappeared along with it. Took me about half an hour to rectify.
I had been feeling so pleased with myself because after going through the tutorial again I had actually managed to create a search and made a collection containing all the scenes featuring this character. Emboldened, I split the screen, hoping to have index cards on one side and the relevant text on the other so that I could write up a synopsis of each scene on the corkboard.
Ah, hubris. I seemed to do fine with the first synopsis card. But when I tried to load the next scene into the header the index cards vanished and both panels went blank. I then discovered that the index card I had just written, with the synopsis of the first scene on it, had somehow found it way into the collection I had just created. I don’t want it there! I just can’t seem to control where things end up. It’s a complete pig’s ear and I wish I had never started. I just can’t seem to manage the index cards in a way that is useful to me.