Dotted line mystery

Hi there, dumb question here, but when using the fiction template, in the chapter folder that’s there upon starting a new project there’s a dotted line on the first page where (I’m guessing) it’s intended to write the title of the chapter. When I add a new folder and assign the folder as being a “chapter” that dotted line isn’t there. What clicking do I need to do to keep the chapters uniformly the same and add in this dotted line?
Thanks for your help and if you decided to play a drinking game where every time I say “dotted line”, you take a drink please don’t drive for at least the next three hours.

You may be thinking this is the kind of program that has rules about how you use it, or defined things, like “chapters” that are features that need to be arranged just so. That’s not the case in Scrivener.

In fact, I encourage everyone starting out to avoid any templates right from the start, and focus on two projects: the “Blank” project start, and the interactive tutorial, in the Help menu. The former will help you see what Scrivener really is, without any concepts like chapters or subsections configured for you, and the latter will help you learn how to get around in that test project, and ideally how to build such configurations yourself.

I’m not saying you should stick with it and never use templates, but until you know what the template is even doing, jumping straight into that and just trying to follow its rules will teach you nothing of how the software works. I’ve seen it time and again, people who have solely used a template and have no idea how to change even the simplest thing about it, or make it work better for how they write personally. Scrivener’s whole idea was to be a tool you can adapt to how you write, not for you to come in and follow all of its rules, and change how you write to how it thinks you should.

So, no, you aren’t intended to write the chapter title above the dotted line. In the template you are using, I suspect, the default settings rather don’t print any headings at all, but just use generic numbering (Chapter 1, Chapter 2…). Say you change that though, the most common place to pull a section heading from, be it a chapter, part, section, subsection or figure caption, is the title in the binder, not anything in the text editor.

As for what you’re looking at, you have selected a group with a child item in it, and turned on Scrivenings view. You are thus looking at two sections. If you add another child item you will see two dotted lines. You can type into any of these three—but know that by default what you type into the group’s text editor (above the first dotted line) will not compile. It can thus be a place one might type notes about the section. That is of course an option, a default, not a rule. :slight_smile:

When I add a new folder and assign the folder as being a “chapter” that dotted line isn’t there. What clicking do I need to do to keep the chapters uniformly the same and add in this dotted line?

I don’t really know what you are doing, but I suspect the tutorial will help you overcome the mystery here. :slight_smile:

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Does your dotted line look like this?

If so, you’re not seeing a place to title the chapter, but a divider between text inside the chapter, and sub-elements under it, in this case “Scene”.

You are likely in Scrivenings view where multiple documents are viewed as one. Scrivener has settings in the option panel how the separation between documents appear in this view. This allows you to know when a single document in this view ends.