I did a search for this and didn’t find anything, but the trouble with finding a post on this is that what I’m asking for could be used in a number of different ways making it difficult to search for.
I’m currently well into my 3rd draft, and I’m getting ready to perform what I refer to as a dialogue pass, where I go through the book reading only the dialogue lines for a particular character at a time. I’m checking for a number of things like speech consistency, accent changes, language the character might not normally use and general uniformity. What I wanted to do was figure out a way to tag or code lines of dialogue to a particular person, and each of the other main and primary supporting characters would have similar, unique tags or codes. This could be searched and gathered into one section, and displayed line-by-line for viewing.
Using this method, the writer can filter only the spoken dialogue of a given character, and this data could be viewed all in on shot and compared, line-by-line for all of the traits mentioned above. I thought I could do this by using annotations and find by format and exporting to a document, but I can’t seem to make that work the way I like.
This got me thinking…
Is there a way that Scrivener can allow for the functionality of coding lines of dialogue for each character throughout the book, and then filter the results, as needed, into the editor window in a line-by-line list that you can read through and EDIT on the spot and have those edits reflected back in the main document?
So let’s assume this was up and running. I have been coding my dialogue lines as I’ve been writing, and now I’ve invoked Dynamic Dialogue Editing (or whatever you want to call it). I enter $$Dave (or whatever makes more sense for you)in the field, and I am greeted with the following information in the editor pane:
$$Dave"Carol, if you’re not going to eat your carrots, the least you could do is not throw them at me."
$$Dave"No, I’m saying you never listen to me. That’s the problem."
$$Dave"Right. I’m the one with the problem. Anyone who says that automatically loses the argument."
$$Dave"Fine by me. I’m merely saying that your refusal to do so is telling."
Let’s pretend that this is everything Dave says in the entire book. It could be spread across multiple chapters, but it is all viewable right here in one place. Now, I can read through (similar to Scrivenings Mode) the lines of dialogue and check for all of the things I want to check for without the rest of the book getting in the way. Even better, I can go through and make changes to the dialogue in this mode and those changes get reflected back into those lines of dialogue in the book!
I may be describing how the process works in the worst possible way (it may need to work a different way than I described, or it may be doable with the tools already in place, and I simply haven’t figured it out), but I think you get my meaning. Also, I believe this functionality would be useful for much more than just dialogue.
Can this be done?