Slowly copying and pasting my way through the process of bringing my novel into Scrivener and I was wondering:
Is it possible to have the scene index card on the corkboard “feed” its text to the chapter index card? Or vice versa?
It appears to me that (in the Novel template, at least) chapters appear together on the corkboard whereas scenes do not, so having the index card info in chapters is more valuable (to me, I mean) for a quick look at the whole book. Perhaps I’m missing something, but thought I would ask.
Thanks!
There’s no automatic way to update one document’s index card with the text of another, no; you’d need to just copy and paste for this. If you have multiple scenes per chapter, though, you’re probably better off writing a separate synopsis for the chapter anyway, since you’d presumably want to include the major points of each scene, and likely more briefly than they’re indicated on each scene’s index card. (Obviously this is all personal style, though.) Assuming you’ve got a set up with something like a folder for a chapter and then a series of subdocuments in that folder for each of its chapters, you can do the copy and paste pretty simply with a little trick of locking the inspector.
First, split the editor. In the first editor, load the Draft (or Manuscript) folder on the corkboard, so you see the index cards for each chapter folder. (Assuming here that your chapter folders are top-level folders under the Draft, as in the Novel template.)
In that editor’s footer, click the ⇄ button to link the editors, so that when you make a selection in the first editor, it opens on the second. Now if you click the card for a chapter in the first editor, all the scene cards for that chapter will open on the second.
With the focus in the first editor, open the inspector if it’s not showing and click the lock icon in the right of its footer. This locks the inspector to that editor, so that even if you switch the focus to the second editor, the information displayed in the inspector is still that of whatever’s selected in the first editor. So, if you select the Chapter One index card in the first editor, the Chapter One folder’s info will display in the inspector even when you then go click around on the scene index cards in the other editor. This lets you select text in the scene cards and drag it to Chapter One’s index card in the inspector to copy it to Chapter One’s synopsis. (You can also just use the regular copy/paste commands, of course.) Once you’ve finished chapter one, click on Chapter Two in the first editor and its info will load in the inspector while the second editor also updates to display all of chapter two’s scenes.
A few other thoughts here:
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You can select a container in the binder and choose Documents > Open > With All Subdocuments (also available in the right-click context menu) to load all the item’s subdocuments, regardless of their level: thus you could load the whole Manuscript on the corkboard so you’d see the scene cards and chapter cards all together. You can’t rearrange cards in this view, but if you’re just looking for an overview, this might do it for you.
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You could also use the outliner for an overview, since that can display hierarchy. Select the Manuscript folder and load it in the editor in outline view, then use View > Outline > Expand All to display all the subdocuments. You can add or remove outliner columns as well by using View > Outliner Columns (or the arrow button in the editor header just above the scroll bar) to display the information that’s pertinent to you at any given time when you’re getting your overview.
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You may have excellent reasons for using copy/paste to bring your work into Scrivener, but I just wanted to make sure you know that File > Import > Files… is usually the faster way to do this. (If they’re ODT files, then that’s not available, so copying and pasting might be just as simple as resaving as an RTF and importing that.) Once you’ve imported the document, you can use Document > Split to break the text into smaller sections and then drag them around in the binder to organize them into folders, etc.
I am more and more amazed by both the product itself and the friendly (and specific) advice offered here. Thank you! It is tempting to follow your suggestions with a sample story just to exercise Scrivener’s many features. (And I probably will!)
Happily, I have used the import file ability to get started. Copy/pasting seemed necessary after that to follow the Chapter/Scene template structure but, after playing with “split document,” I realized that my naturally short chapters do not require what I define as scenes. But this then brought up for me my continuing puzzled state regarding folders and documents. Must a folder(Chapter) contain a document(Scene)? I (thought) I was having great success just “splitting” my chapters and leaving the text in (what I assume) in a folder. Is that a good idea or a bad one? Am I setting myself for problems? Tried a compile and it spit it out a beautiful PDF, so that brought me cheer.
THANKS!
Scrivener basically doesn’t care about Chapters and Scenes. It simply thinks in terms of hierarchy in the binder. Documents can have both subfolders and subdocuments and Scrivener won’t care.
The reason for this flexibility is that you can apply different settings to the title and text of each level in the hierarchy in some very flexible ways, which are accessible in the “All Options > Formatting” tab of the compilation dialogue. This means that Scrivener can cater for highly complex structures with many layers of Part / Chapter / Section / Subsection / Subsubsection etc and give each of them different prefixes, numbering, formatting and separators.
But for relatively simple cases – such as novels – you don’t need anything complicated and the defaults are fine.
The simplest way I’ve found to think about it is:
Folders: use them when you just want a title.
Documents: use them when you want either title + text, or just text on its own.
So, for a typical novel with Chapter headings (with no abstract or quotation) that are followed by a number of untitled scenes you might have folders with no text to provide the titles. Indented under that you will have a number of subdocuments which will provide the text of the scenes, with the scene titles being ignored at compilation.
If you want to know more detail about how your arrangement of folders and documents can interact with the compilation options to enable you to have total control over the structure of the document, read section 23.8.1 of the manual (I’m on the Mac version, but I think it’s the same). But if your needs are basic then it’s very likely that you don’t need to…
Regards
David
Thank you, David! It is good to hear that my newcomer’s assumptions are fairly accurate. I plan to spend some time perusing the manual at leisure this weekend.
Glad it helped!
Despite the (usually hidden) complexity, I find most of Scrivener to be fairly intuitive once you’ve grasped a few basic points (e.g. the relationship between titles and text we discussed above and the fact that it’s not a word processor replacement…
).
But the manual is a very comprehensive and well-put together document and I think you’ll find it both interesting and useful…
regards
David