Choose Your Own Adventure!

Scrivener Wish List
1

Hi All!

I write for Immersive Theater, performances where the audience isn’t confined to one seat or one point of view. The form has been around for a while, but there is no ubiquitous solution for how to script experiences with simultaneous action across multiple rooms over time.

Scrivener has been an amazing tool for drafting immersive scenes, compiling reference imagery, and laying out these experiences as “choose-your-own-adventure” books. Each “track’s” content can be displayed and linked perfectly, but Scrivener doesn’t currently have a tool that can show me an overview of all of my tracks and how they line up over time. This could serve as a Table of Contents for any kind of non-linear storytelling!

This doesn’t have to be super complicated, even just the ability to import an excel spreadsheet and edit it within Scrivener would be helpful. “Tables” are not currently set up for efficient editing– there are few keyboard shortcuts, formatting changes can’t easily be undone, coloring cells is a multi-step process.

I’ve attached a spreadsheet that would ideally serve as the ToC for a show I’m writing based on The Little Prince. Each scene title (“Lookout Lockout”, “Police Chase 1”, etc.) would then link to a chapter with the full text of the scene!

Is something like this possible?
PrinceTrackingHorizontal.pdf (57.6 KB)

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Some people make use of the Outliner view in conjunction with custom meta-data to in effect create a very simple spreadsheet, upon which you can mark things by plot line (or whatever). In the example I linked to, they used three bullets and made nice use of the ability to colour meta-data text, but the nice thing about this method is that custom meta-data is just a text field so you can put whatever you want in there. You can use symbols like they have (and for that you have nearly all of Unicode available to you, even Emoji) or text description for why that beat is where it is.

While referencing that thread, note one post down from the screenshot from the developer. We have played with a view that works a bit like what you’ve illustrated—but as noted, it’s still a prototype, so we aren’t going to promise anything.

P.S. The Little Prince is one of my favourite books (but I suppose a good many people can say that! :slight_smile: ).