Can I run an idea by writers?

Scrivener
1

I’m writing a book with quite a few characters. Since there are so many (essential to the plot, I assure you) I have worked extra hard to give them each such a distinct voice that they are ALMOST exaggerated. It’s kind of important, I think.

I was just thinking that perhaps on their characters page, I should copy and paste EVERY section of their POV sections. That way, once I’m done, I can reread each one as a whole to ensure I stuck to it.

So, before I go to all that work, does anyone see a flaw in this (or an easier way works too). What do you think? Makes sense to my brain, but I may be missing something huge. :smiley:

2

IMHO, Copy&Paste may be overkill and also have the undesired side effect of forcing you to keep up integrity manually.

I’d rather tag the corresponding documents with keywords or labels for the different characters, and then use Search or Collections to review each character’s voice.

Just my 2 cents.

3

Off to check tabs/collections and see what I find. That’s why I asked! Want the best use of my time/resources!

Thanks

4

Various options:

  1. As suggested - use keywords.

  2. Add a comment (don’t bother with labels, unless you want then for some other purpose). Shift+Apple+Asterisk - use a different comment-label for each voice (this will also give you a visible queue in the Scrivening itself. Then search for that comment-label (select Text as the Search In option), and then save that search as a Collection.

  3. Add a footnote - again use a specific label (like DialogueTom - something that won’t show up in text).

  4. Either (all) solutions will typically only point you at the document that contains the text, not the actual text point (unless you’ve used comments or footnotes). So if you have multiple voices in one scrivening it’s less useful or within a document you can use Apple+G to move to the next found item. Remember that it ‘costs’ you nothing to split the document as many times as you like, so you could separate out the more important dialogue parts (combined with one of the approaches above).

  5. David Hewson (Bodsham on here, posts occasionally and has written a book on Scrivener among all his fiction) advocates using a Story Bible to record important points about characters - for continuity’s sake apart from anything else. This does involve copying and pasting.

Or there’s more mundane - apply a unique colour to different voices. You could even go as far as creating pseudo tags in the document (which you’d need to remove afterwards). e.g. ##VOICE-DICK ##VOICE-HARRY.

Ultimately the granularity is up to you and whatever interferes with actually doing the writing least…