I try to keep the structure as “flat” as possible cause I am putting an entire novel series into one project (Currently 70+ single novels). Folders do separate the single novels, documents represent chapters, No scenes required . I’m not changing the viewpoint (scenes) within one chapter.
Greetings,
Thomas
I’m a Parts/Chapters writer. I break the story into four parts based on the three act structure. Act 1 is Part 1. Act 2 is broken at the mid-point, ending Part 2, after which Part 3 begins. Act 3 is my Part 4. I find it much easier to manage this way, no matter the length of the product.
Each Parts folder contains as many Chapter folders as I need. If it’s a shorter work, I may use only text folders in each Part folder.
As for compiling, I limit myself to compiling into a Word document for review/edits. However, I noticed in the latest RC 9 that epub v2 is now in use, so I might try that for editing. Once my editing and reviews are done, I compile to text-only, and format that .txt output in Word. I don’t use any other Scrivener formatted output.
Kind of depends for what.
For my “non-writing” life, I use Scrivener to structure both my resume and linkedin Profile. Each document represents a portion of the larger document (or profile page, in the LinkedIN, case.).
While this would not be much harder to do in Word (and I have, previously before I started to use Scrivener), I like the versioning feature for quick comparisons between changes to highlight keywords or other reasons to customize the document.
For example, in the resume document, there is a folder for headline, experience, and education. Each item in there is a text document that can be turned on / off at compile to produce a slightly different and more customized version of the document.
For my “writing” life, I like the folders for parts, (sub-)folders for chapters, and scene text documents. I make heavy use of the notes and cards features to organize the scenes and I use the collections to track plot / subplots through, I do use folders with text documents that are not compiled for organization of character and world information.
I tend to use other software to research though, I don’t use Scrivener for that.
It depends on the length of what I’m writing.
I’ll start off by saying that I used to always write entire chapters as one long document and leave it at that. In fact, I have done this since buying Scrivener in 2013 and only just stopped as of about a month ago. Why?
Because for the first time, what I was writing outgrew my ability to keep the total story in my head.
I was losing track of which chapters certain events happened in. For instance, one of my characters has had a few undiagnosed panic attacks. About 120,000 words into the story, I realized that I needed to refer to those scenes again. But how the hell was I going to find them? I had a vague recollection of where in the story they were, but 120,000 words is a lot to comb through to find a few specific scenes that don’t last very long.
I managed to find them by remembering how I’d described them and searching for the phrases. I keyworded those chapters (my first time seriously using keywords!) and went back to writing. A little later, I needed the scenes again, and searched the keywords. Then I realized another problem: the chapters themselves could reach up to 10,000 words each and that’s still a lot to comb through to find one scene.
And there were other events I needed to keyword, too, so that I could refer to them later or determine where they were in the timeline or how often they had happened. And keywording a whole chapter just wasn’t cutting it due to the amount of words involved. Finally I bit the bullet and spent a few hours splitting up all 120,000 words into specific scenes, naming them all to describe what they contained, and keywording each and every one of them. It has made keeping track of my story vastly easier and I wish I’d done it sooner.
That said, I still write new chapters as one long document. I have to. I can’t scene-split as I write, it interrupts the flow of my work and really throws me off. I just throw an asterisk between scene changes and keep going. But now when I’m done a chapter, I go back and split up the scenes into separate documents, tagging with keywords as I go. While this is frustrating when I need to re-read an entire chapter — I’m still getting used to viewing an entire folder’s subdocuments at once, because the line and large gap between scrivenings throws me off when reading — it’s far more manageable to search than one massive document. For this particular story, the trade-off is worth it.
However, for my shorter stories (under 60,000 words), I still write chapters as one long document, because there’s not nearly as many events to keep track of. As long as I can keep it all in my head, I’ll leave chapters as single files. My brain just likes that better for the flow of things, both writing and reading.
Good god, that’s impressive. I have a series in a single project, too, but it’s only six books — and two of them are novellas. I can’t imagine A) the dedication it takes to write 70 novels, and B) the amount of organization it takes to keep them all straight. I salute you, sir.
Thank you much. Scrivener helps me a lot to keep the overview. The series is initially designed for 100 episodes (300.000 characters each). The good thing about Scrivener is the ability to manage all the research material, illustrations, covers, etc. in one project.
Greetings,
Thomas
I selected all of the “book-with” options. To clarify, though: I prefer to work with a book that has parts, then chapters that ARE the text documents. In order to get my chapter headings (when compiling) to be the narrator’s name instead of the chapter title (“narrator” is a custom metadata label I use for color coding in the binder–created in Scrivener 2), I ended up putting every chapter document into a Chapter Heading folder titled with the narrator label, and creating a custom compile preset that used those.
I could have retitled the chapters, but I need my working titles in the binder.
Anyway, it’d be super cool if I could just use a Label as a chapter heading option when compiling.
When working longform, I have a ‘book’ folder with ‘chapters’ nested underneath it, I then have additional folders nested underneath the ‘book’ for such things as ‘language’, ‘dramatis personae’, ‘places’, ‘research’, etc., some or all of which may contain images as well as text. When working shortform, everything is nested under a ‘parent’ which is named for the story.
I write radio/audio fiction so . . .
So far Scrivener has been truly disappointing with regards to importing media, and a lot of people say the same and they will not fix it.
I use this for manuals and sometimes I have thousands of folders with a text document and photo’s / images in each one. The import function can add all of these in one go to Scrivener which is great, but it has a few main issues which are very annoying and make it useless:
My folders all start with a date and time, such as “2010-10-12 2317 Test folder” which should make them very easy to sort in the correct order in binder when imported. But scrivener cannot sort these into numerical order, and instead puts them in a nonsensical order which does not make any sense which is very annoying and makes it useless.
Scrivener will not keep the images in each folder added to the binder, instead moving ‘ALL’ of them all to the research folder, making it a nightmare to go through thousands of images when they should be in the folder added.
Does not have a way to refresh the binder with newly added or deleted folders, with texts, images, other content. Another shortsighted letdown.
I hope Scrivener can fix this immediately as it is a function that many would use. We do not need Scrivener to add the images to each text part when imported, but just have them viewable so they can be dragged and dropped / or inserted into the text part easier.
Scrivener, please fix this immediately.
Most of the comments here concern creative work of various types, but I didn’t see anything about legal documents, specifically appellate briefs. The structure is as follows (for federal briefs at least):
Type Size, Style, Word Count
Statement of Jurisdiction
Statement of Facts
Table of Authorities
Summary of Argument
Argument I
Argument II
Argument III
Conclusion
Some of these are only a paragraph long; the first might be only a single sentence: “The brief was printed in double spaced 12 point Times Roman, is 40 pages long and contains 10,000 words.”
Oher sections may be as long as 20, 30 pages, subject to page size limitations.
Scrivener is the perfect tool to write these. I wish I had it a long time ago.
My current quibble is that pdf files are treated as image files. Of course they are, but…
Don’t think many people will do it my way, but here we go:
Folders for Acts - inside I write a summary/notes of the Act - which I don’t include in compile
Folders for Beats (within act) (again, I write my summary/notes in here)
A document that will not be included in the compile with the plainly written out version of the scene - and other information and notes
And within that a document with the actual scene
It’s a bit bothersome, but I really need the structure - so that’s why Scrivener (on pc) really is a wonderful tool for me!
This part of my projects is not the confusing part. Text documents are text documents. I am frustrated with the front and back matter. I would like them to act more as a database, and a lot less like text documents. I would like ordered bespoke fields for the population of glossary and index words and phrases (with their explanations and definitions, and key occurrences in the manuscript), for bibliographic citations (author, publication, volume, date, page, quoted passage, UID), for illustration and figures and their attributions. I would like a rethink and wholesale integration of what is now the awkwardly separate revisioning, edit mode, and snapshots, the writing tools, and a means of inviting team members with view, suggest, edit privilege status rankings. I would like far fewer tools for formatting in the main editor, and far more intuitive and fluid control over the formatting rules for compile. I would like a toggled (on/off) preview button that would show any current main editor document formatted according to the current compile setting assignments (centered at the current editor position within that document). I would like to toggle between editing modes (the first mode as simple text without formatting, the second editing within the preview mode with all formatting as it would be with current compile settings). I would dearly love it if Scrivener were to maintain live concordance maps of word use (deltas from corpus word frequencies) at the project and at individual binder entity granularities. I would like it if most of the interface tools would go away or could be set away and for Scrivener to allow me to make more use of intuitively triggered and organized context sensitive menus. I would like it very much if I could set up in-line in-margin display of illustrations, figures, pull text, quotations, authors notes, asides, photographs, graphs, maps, definitions, etc. These would be identical to the inline notes Scrivener now uses, but they could be assigned a toggled in-margin property with would display them on the page and scrolling with the text strings they referenced within the main document text. I would like the ability to have Scrivener mine my manuscript’s text for specific subject matter catagories like dates, epochs, people, social groupings, events, places, things, etc. and to present such data in appropriate viewers like timelines, maps, network graphs, etc. that would act as navigators to the text the way that collections now work for arbitrary text strings. I would like such rich data type views to be offered along side of the “outline” and “cork board” views, perhaps with multi axes control of data type combinations (people over time, people over place, word concordance over time, word concordance over manuscript, people and things, things and places over time, word concordance over people over time, etc.).
Is that enough Keith? (a man can hope)
Yes, this is true because Scrivener really doesn’t have much in the way of data typing and data mining by data type. Would be nice if Scrivener knew the difference between datas and places and people and concepts and things and could work intelligently with these data types despite inconsistancies in the formation of the instances of these types (how for instance a date is presented month/day/year, mm/dd/yyyy, m/d/y, m-d-y, 12/3/1934, December 18, '34, 18 Dec 1934, December 18th, Nineteen Thirty-four, etc.). Scrivener doesn’t keep a timeline as one types, doesn’t rectify “the next day” or “three days earlier” or “when Joe was eleven” or “four years after WWII” or “he waited months”. Scrivener doesn’t mine for place. Can’t build and maintain a map of relative locations, doesn’t mine text for “they drove south from Chicago for 3 days” or “the outhouse was right beside the cucumber patch” or “it took her 45 minutes to walk home from school” or “they met each day after school at a little diner on the east of town” or “after she met Jim, she moved with him from Detroit to Paris”. Scrivener doesn’t keep track of characters, of places, of events, of dates, of things, of plot arches, of conflicts, of social connections, of life progressions, of unanswered questions, of thesis, or of plot. Scrivener allows many ways of attaching meta-data to documents and strings within documents, but it has no tools to extract the type of any of that meta-data, can’t therefor automate based on that data, not at least at the semantic level.
That would be good Keith, some progress towards bridging the gap between editing formats and compile formats. I love the concentration on the process of writing that Scrivener offeres, but that concentration is confused with so much formatting during writing tool availability. I’d like to be able to write in simple mode (sentences/paragraphs/sections/chapters/parts) and leave the formatting to Scrivener presets. But I would also like the freedom to hop fluidly between formatting settings (writing format mode, compile format modes) while writing.
At the moment I am in the middle of completing a number of trilogies. Along those lines I have three folders, one for each book, with each folder containing text documents that each serve as a whole chapter. I have separate projects for each trilogy.
My books begin as scroungy, messy collection of bits and pieces that I move around. Scrivener’s patience with this approach is one of the main reasons I use the app.
My projects are always non-fiction.
I generally make documents and sub-docs as short as possible to facilitate organizing. With time, chapters take form; but even then, I like graf-length documents until quite late in the process. Makes editing much easier. And, forces me to be careful when writing graf-level topic sentences, assisting the logical flow.
As overall form becomes clear I depend on outline mode.
Summary: using very short ’chapters’, I depend on Scrivener’s handling of my disparate content and my poor organization. I throw very messy stuff at the app; initially I’ll have a hundred ‘chapters’. S helps me find connections because I can glance at my short subs, which eventually become real chapters; those messy subs are dragged into newly- formed Chapters.
Hope this is helpful.
I write a speculative fiction podcast called PodPlanet.org
Currently I am writing a 13 x 45 minute episodes.
It goes as follows.
I spend a week and write 30 - 340 Loglines.
I find the most compelling 20.
Using PLOTTR I start outling.
I built a specific template for my purposes on PLOTTR.
It’s a 3 Act Template with a teaser, 3 acts, 4 interluds, and a denouement.
The PLOTTR outlines are incredibly detaied.
After I am satisfied with the outllines, I render them in Scrivener.
The outlines appear as SYNOPSIS in Scrivener.
From there, I write the scripts (using the same story template created on PLOTTR.)
Once the outlines are imported into Scriv, I begin writing. 3 - 7 days laters I have a fully finished script ready to be recorded.
Regards.
Oliver
I’m working on a fantasy petalogy. I have one folder for each of the five books. Each book is divided into folders that represent the 3-act-structure of a novel. The second act has two folders, however, to mark a middle point. And because the second act is twice as long as the first and the third. Each text document within an act folder represents a scene. Only in the end I’m going to decide which and how many scenes will form a chapter. Then I’m going to add more folders so that each of them will represent a chapter and I’ll move all the scenes that go into one chapter into these folders.
Pamina
What might help also with compile is show examples of compile output with list of settings from section layout part as well as how to set up front and back matter. If put on one of blogs people could see setup that might like and the steps to get there
