I’m importing 100,000 words of existing novel from Word into Scrivener. So far, I have created chapter documents for each of my existing 24 chapters and copied that chapter’s text across into the relevant document. I gather the next step is to further subdivide these chapters into scenes.
What’s the simplest method of doing this? Here’s what I tried: I created a bunch of subdocuments for scenes in the binder under the chapter heading. Then I split the Editor into two, the chapter text in one window and the empty scene document in the other, then cut and pasted the material across to the new scene document. (Please forgive me if I"m not using exactly the right terminology to describe these various elements of Scrivener.)
That procedure seemed to work OK, but I now can’t find a way to delete all the copied-across text from the chapter document.
I am motivated to do this time-consuming task as I can see it will be so much easier to work with the text within Scrivener than trying to manage it in Word. I would just like to find the simplest and most reliable method of doing so. I’d be extremely grateful if anyone can advise me. Thanks!
No need to do the copy-paste-delete-from-original tango…
Find “Split at Selection” in the Scrivener menu. I’m not at my Mac, so I can’t locate the menu item now, but if you go to Help and enter “Split” in the search box found there, it should locate it for you. That feature will create a new document containing everything after your cursor’s position and removing that text from the document from which it was split.
Edit: There’s also a keyboard shortcut, which will show up next to that menu item. Very convenient as you split your documents into bits.
Yes, as Robert says, you can use the “Split” feature for this, under the Documents menu. Split at Selection (cmd-K) will split the document at the current cursor point. Split with Selection as Title (opt-cmd-K) will split the document and assign the selected text as the title for the new document (the new document will be opened with that text still selected so that you can quickly delete it if you want).
There’s also the File > Import > Import and Split… feature that allows you to import and split a document automatically. This requires there to be some sort of text break between each chapter or scene where you want to split things, though, although you could enter a page break character.