I am a new Scrivener user, and am writing a novel.
I have started sub-folders for each chapter, and am ready to move on to the next step. For the past many months I have been writing down ideas for my novel as they come to me. I have a lot of them. I would like to type each idea into each chapter before I begin composing the chapter. I don’t think that the corkboard would be the place for that, but maybe it is. I haven’t yet seen the scratch pad except in the tutorial. Can you separate the scratchpad entries by chapter?
How do you recommend I type each idea to get them off my notepads and into Scrivener?
There is quite a bit of flexibility here in how you can approach this problem, mainly because we wouldn’t want to force anyone into working a certain way. Here are some common applications of the existing features which can be used for chapter notes:
Document Notes: each folder has available to it a document notepad, in fact everything in the binder has one of these, with the exception of the few dedicated binder elements like Draft and Research. To see this, click the blue ‘i’ button in your toolbar, or press Ctrl-Shift-I. Make sure the left-most button that looks like a spiralbound notebook at the very bottom of this slide-out is selected. The large blank area that dominates the view is your notetaking area. Try typing in a sample line, then clicking on another chapter in the binder. Note how what you typed disappears? You are looking at the notepad for the new chapter, not the one you had just entered notes in for. Now try clicking on the title bar where it says “Document Notes”, and change that to “Project Notes”. Type in a test line, and switch back to the folder you were just looking at. See how it stays the same? Project notes are available from any item in the binder. It’s a universal tool. Switch back to Document Notes—you should see your original test line pop back up.
Folder Text: most of our built-in compile presets do not export any text that you write into the folder itself; this is something that can be customised. That’s right, folders can have text just like a file can. To see the text material for the folder, simply turn off the corkboard by clicking on the corkboard button in the toolbar, or pressing Ctrl-2 (the Corkboard toggle shortcut). Now you can type into the folder’s text area and keep your notes here. Note how when you do so, the folder icon acquires a little paper badge in it over in the Binder? That’s your cue that this folder has notes. An advantage to this method is more obvious when you have some section cards within the folder. Try creating a couple of cards beneath the folder with a test line in each. Now select the folder again, and use the View/Scrivenings menu command (Ctrl-1). You should see your notes at the very top, a divider line, the text for the first scene, a divider line, and the text for the second scene, and so on. So that’s nice as you can just scroll up whenever you need to check out your document notes. Another advantage to this method that is subtle is that item text can be targeted when remotely with text. For example, say you are writing in some scene within chapter 5, and you have a great idea for something in chapter 2. You could switch to chapter 2, show its text type it in, and then go back to the scene you were at before. This would not be a bad way of working—but an even more efficient way of doing that would be to, right in that scene, just type out your note for chapter 2. When done, select it, then right-click on the text and select Append Selection to Document/, choosing the chapter 2 folder as your target. Hit backspace to delete the note from your current session, and continue writing in the scene.
Index Cards: or more accurately, just binder items as they are one and the same. Just because something is in the draft doesn’t necessarily mean it is a part of the manuscript. In the Inspector, check out the middle “General” section. One one of your sample cards you made, try unchecking “Include in Compile”. The contents of this card, and indeed the whole item itself, will now be ignored by the compiler when building the final copy. It is in essence a personal note to yourself. You may wish to use a different font in these sections to set them apart in Scrivenings. But they can be interspersed freely at all levels of the outline, wherever they are contextually applicable, so it is a very useful way of working. If you name them something consistent like “NOTE - Topic of note” they are also easy to spot for being what they are. Some people like to use labels to accentuate them as well.
So that’s a few ideas. Also you have inline annotations at your disposal, but those are better for comments to yourself within the narrative itself.
Scratch pad can be nice, but like project notes, they are better if you don’t know where the idea should go yet, or don’t want to bother with filing it at the moment.
I have been using the corkboard to write down my ideas. What appeals to me about this is that with the corkboard you can rearrange the cards after they have been written.
However, the cards (and the upper space in the inspector) show very little text at a time.
Is there a method which allows me to rearrange the order, while allowing me to see more of what I have typed?
The size of the index cards can be customised. In the lower right-hand corner of the corkboard, in the footer bar, you should see a little “four card” button. Click that and you’ll get access to the corkboard settings. Here you can set the cards to be huge if you want, or very tall instead of squat. If you tend to write a lot into the card itself, this is a good trick to know of. Setting how many cards across to something low is a good way of getting large cards without fiddling too much. Two, or even one card across will give you a lot of space to work with.
I have another issue. I have been entering my ideas onto index cards, and I think I’m going to stick with that approach.
However, I have one reference book which will be the source of many ideas. I plan to divide these ideas among three chapters. Each of my planned chapters has its own file.
I would like to first type all of the ideas from this one reference source into a temporary file, and then later move each idea/index card to one of the three relevant chapters/files.
Is it possible to move an index card from one file to another?
Sure, just drag it over from project binder to another. That will copy pretty much everything about it, including any extra data you add to the inspector.
By the way, when I click on the outline box, the far right box of the three above the work area, I see the title of each index card but none of the text.
Is there a way for me to see the text of each index card in the outline?
It should be showing the Synopsis column be default, but if that got switched off for some reason, you can set up columns using the little button in the top-right corner of the outliner, or the View menu.
Just to reiterate a few of the ideas there; two ideas that strike me are that you could nest documents like this;
Folder - Chapter
Text - Scene (set the synopsis and narrative notes here)
Text - Manuscript
Then use different compile options to build up a synopsis document, the novel with your notes, or your novel without the notes. And you can use the scrivenings mode throughout.
Or you could alternate notes with manuscript – if you open the Inspector and look in ‘General metadata’, you can uncheck ‘Include in Compile’ for your notes and they won’t appear. You will have these pairs of documents that live together, like so;
Chapter 1
Scene 1 Notes
Scene 1
Scene 2 Notes
Scene 2
Scene 3 Notes
Scene 3
Anyway, this is just what I’ve come up with as approaches so far.