Best Practices for Poetry

Scrivener
1

Hello,

I’d like to kick off a conversation on how poets use Scrivener. I’ve been using Scrivener on and off since 2007. From a pure process perspective, the Snapshot feature is the must-have that keeps bringing me back. This has been there since the beginning, and other writing apps with such a feature either disappeared or dropped the feature. As I revise poems, it’s so important to (easily) see multiple, previous versions.

That said, the updated interface has me using Scriv completely again. But in all my time using it, I’m never satisfied that I’ve figured out the best way to write poetry in the application. In particular, the organization of the binder.

So I’m asking for your stories, experiences, and insights to using Scrivener for poetry. To start, here’s what I do:

I keep all my poems in one project. Actually, any writing I do related to poetry is in this one project. Ideas, journaling, reearch, etc.
My main binder section, labeled ‘Working’ in the screenshot, is a relabeling of ‘Draft’. Not sure if this is the best approach or not.
I tend to organize poems for submission packets, chapbooks, or full manuscripts in Collections. I think this works well.
I’m just now tackling the new 3.0 Compile functionality to build an ebook of a 70 page manuscript. I’m a bit flummoxed, since there’s some ‘interesting’ formatting (for example, I have an ‘index’ in the back that links themes to certain poems…)

That’s a start. Like I said, I do love Scrivener, but am always on the lookout for better organizational and other ideas. Most of the advice here and elsewhere revolves around novels and other long-form writing. Anything you’re willing to share about your process would be great!

Thanks for your insights,
Jeff

JMN Scriv Environment .png
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2

Nice topic to discuss. Although writing poems has never been my main occupation or creative endeavor, I have written quite a few, and also published some in a magazine. Over the years writing technology changed and my poems were all over the place. The original files of my published poems were long gone, so I scanned the issues of the magazine and OCR’d the poems.

I also published many poems, predominantly haikus, on a blog and social media. Again dispersed and all over the place. So I started collecting them.

After weeks of searching and organising I finally have collected everything in Scrivener (S3/Mac).

Scrivener offers all the flexibility to organise your work how ever you want it, and you can always change it. But I decided to give every poem its own document. So that it is easy to rearrange them and create collections when you need a specific output.

I created folders under the “Poetry Manuscript” main document for English Poems, Dutch Poems. Subdivided into ‘General Poems’ (all standard forms of poetry) and Haikus.

So I have for example:

English Poems > English Haikus > haiku-1, etc …
English Poems > Published Poems > Quintessential Munich (i.e. the name of a cycle of 5 poems) > Quintessential Munich I …

Dutch Poems > Dutch Haikus > haiku-1 , haiku-2 etc …

The next step I still have to do is to give the poems individual titles. They got these automatically generated titles, because I chopped up a long document with all the poems in it (50 English and 50 Dutch in total, these numbers are coincidental, all the poems are unique and not translations).

Lastly I colour-coded the haikus with colours signifying the four seasons, which of course is important for haikus.

So I must take a deep breath and rename all the poems in the binder. Some future time I will decide whether it is a good idea to bundle individual collections and publish them (again).

As I also give small workshops in haiku writing, Scrivener is ideal to help me find a few examples, combine it with background information and general information about the haiku-form, and prepare material for a workshop. I also collect the work of my workshop-members in a special folder and send them the result of their collective effort as an ebook.

I realise that it is all a pretty standard way of working in Scrivener, nothing outlandish. I might extend the way I manage the poems by using custom metadata, keywords etc, but for now I have decided not to spend too much time on document management. I’m happy that every poem I ever wrote is now identified and can be found.

I hope this contributes somthing to your quest.

3

This might be overkill for your situation, but if you have a lot of poems and you sometimes need to categorize them differently, then you may want to experiment with Scrivener Keywords.

You’ve already grouped your poems into folders by Type. But let’s say, for example, that sometimes you want to collect them by Theme, what you could do is create Theme keywords as needed (Love, Nature, Food, etc.) and assign one or more of them to the appropriate poem.

Then, if you do a project search by keyword, and save the resulting search as a Collection, that Search Collection will refresh automatically. As an example, if your Search Collection is Keyword = ‘Love’, if you click on your Love collection, you’ll get a list of all the relevant poems.

Just something to play with. Hopefully it gives you some ideas. :slight_smile:

Best,
Jim

2 Likes
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Hi Jim,

I think that’s actually a good idea. Especially the combination with Collections has the potential to quickly produce meaningful gatheriings of poems.

I think the OP has started an interesting thread.

Thx. Jim,

Best,

Submarin

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These days, I use Scrivener exclusively for my poems.

Originally, I did as was desbribe din the first post. I also used keywords to make lists of kinds of poems. Eventually, I used so many features that the project would load slowly or lock up. I simplified.

Now I number them and put them in folders with separate folders for submissions and research.

I style all my text. It makes my life easier.

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What binder template are you using to begin your poetry project? I am new to poetry and writing in general and have the newest version of Scrivener and there is not poetry template in the Miscellaneous. Is there one available elsewhere? Blessings, Elizabeth

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Hi, I have multiple drafts of every poem, and there are hundreds. I’m not sure how to structure importing them all to Scrivener from old Word docs…use each grouping of drafts as chapters? Folders? Sub-folders? Any feedback is helpful please. Thanks in advance.

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Something you could try playing with is the Snapshots feature, which is designed for precisely this sort of thing. While ordinarily one would use it as they embark on a revision, it can certainly be used retroactively as well. To give it a try:

  1. Create a new item in your binder, and paste the oldest revision you have available for the poem.

  2. Use the Navigate ▸ Inspect ▸ Snapshots menu command. This will open the right sidebar and switch to the Snapshots tab, which is where you will be tracking your revisions by and large.

  3. Click the + button at the top of this tab to take a snapshot of the current text.

    You will see an entry added to the list, and the text from the current state of the main editor copied into it.

  4. Now copy and paste the next revision into the main editor.

  5. Before doing anything, take a look at one thing this feature can make quite nice, click the Compare button in the snapshots sidebar. To the right of that, the ••• button has options for how detailed the markings should be.

  6. Click the + button again to store the second revision.

At this point you would continue copying and pasting each revision of this poem, taking a snapshot, and repeating, until you’ve got them all stored. Now you can compare any version to each other (select two snapshots to compare them together rather than to the main text) or the current state.

That’s the basic idea! In addition to the comparison feature, what is nice about this approach is when you look back over into the binder. Clean, simple, one single entry for this poem. No piles of clutter that you have to wade through in search results or otherwise.

4 Likes
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Wow, a blast from the past (op here!)

As a poet, snapshots is my number one reason to use Scrivner and a feature not quite available so effectively in any other writing tool.

Every poem starts as a new item in the binder and when I revise, I hit the snapshot button, then start revising.

I can always go back and see past versions, compare, revert, etc.

Some poems have dozens of snapshots, some one or none. All very clean and functional.

Truly my ‘killer feature’ I can no longer work without!

1 Like
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The snapshot feature does sound like a godsend - your advice is great. I think this is the approach I’ll take to start with - so I’m very grateful for your input. Thanks.

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Thanks! I’ll give the snapshot feature a go.

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Can anyone come up with a more straightforward (faster) way to import versions, retroactively as snapshots, other than cut & paste for each edit version (snapshot) on import? Sigh.

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Can you edit web pages or ePub internals like XML files? If so, Snapshots aren’t too complicated of a format to figure out, and one could create a script to batch import into a binder item if they felt it worth the time. For the most part snapshots are loose files using a date based naming scheme in your .scriv folder/package with a simple file describing their metadata (date and title). I can share the details if you’re interested.

It’s just not something we’ve ever had much demand for as a feature though, as most people don’t have stacks of revisions they want to migrate into the software retroactively. It’s more the kind of feature that operates as a gateway for the concept of keeping so many old revisions, as the alternatives are clumsy (lots of files scattered around, etc.). So copy and paste is usually fine for the few that have half a dozen or so.

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