Longtime Scrivener user. I’m at a reset point in a longterm project and am taking the time to restart my binder organization. Looking into the manual it seems I have been organizing things in a…nontraditional or nonrecommended manner. I’m looking for some advice moving forward.
The nonfiction project has several, distinct, chapters that all have their own notes, comments, outlines, etc as scrivenings. Up to this point, I have had a folder for each chapter in the standard ‘draft’ root folder. But, instead of using the separate research folder, I have been dumping notes, outlines, comments, brainstorms that would never be compiled into each draft chapter folder. Each chapter, in addition to these notes, has multiple concurrent versions–say, a long chapter, shorter chapter, multiple versions for presentations.
Even though the chapter research materials are fairly distinct, I am reticent to split each chapter into its own project because that would cut off the ability to see progress on the project as a whole. I could imagine mirroring the chapter structure in both the Draft and Research folders, although that might be a clunky readjustment…
However, you can imagine the current system makes compiling a very manual process, and makes word count tracking nonfunctional.
Again a general suggestion would be make collections for the notes/research/ background info and store in research in folder chapter x research.
Can open collection then all research is available. Open file you are writing on as a quick reference panel which can float as review research.
Other way is open a scene as a quick reference panel and open bookmarks. Now drag all associated research into documents bookmarks section and will have a bookmark preview available in the inspector.
If it were me, I would probably Duplicate the entire Draft folder, drag the duplicate into the Research folder, and then delete all the not-research documents. Then I’d delete all the research materials from the Draft folder.
How to deal with the concurrent versions depends on what you ultimately want to do with them. If you’re planning separate “works,” I would group related versions together. That is, put all the components of the full length manuscript in one folder, all the components of the presentation version in one folder, and so on.
If it were me, I’d listen to @kewms and do what she suggests.
As an alternative, if your current approach better suits your own preferred way of working (especially if you still have a way to go and like your current workflow), you could use keywords or other metadata to create dynamic Collections and compile quickly and easily from those instead or re-organising your binder.
For example, if you add a keyword “DRAFT-main” to all the documents that will be in the main draft, and then create a Collection based on that keyword, you can then just go to that Collection to see a scrivening of your complete draft while leaving the binder structure as-is. You can also compile directly from that Collection.
You can then also create alternative versions by having other draft keywords (e.g., “DRAFT-presentation-for-Jeff” or “DRAFT-concise”) with their own Collections, noting of course that the same document can be tagged with multiple keywords so that they appear in multiple versions of the draft.
While we’re at it, if you’d prefer something between the two…
Follow @kewms’ advice, but when you’re done go back and add chapter related keywords to all the docs in their new homes. The you can use the Collections trick to effectively recreate the old view with all the drafts and research for a chapter in a single Collection when you need it.
This would give you maximum flexibility to use folder / document structures in your binder to get compile formatting as you want it — assuming, of course, that you’re going to be using Scrivener to create the final version of your output rather than just to export and use another app for that.
Thanks all!! @pigfender I think your ‘hybrid’ version of @kewms’s suggestion sounds great. I have never used the Collections feature at all- it looks perfect for this!