I’ve been working on a somewhat experimental text, I guess, that’s made up of vignettes: several narrative threads’ worth, as well as a bunch of one-offs. As I’m composing them, I’ve got each thread in its own folder, with each vignette in a single scrivening. But when the text is read they will all interweave, sort of like this:
[A1][B][C1][D][E][A2][F][C2]etc
How would you realize this in Scrivener? The first thing I thought to do was in the Compile… dialogue, to rearrange them in the content tab, but you can’t change the order of things there. Then I thought maybe if i said ‘Duplicate’ that the duplicates would act more as aliases, but they really are duplicates.
So, short of simply reorganizing the items completely every time one wants to switch between the acts of composition and sequencing, how would you accomplish that?
I have a very similar structure for one of my projects. The story jumps about quite a bit and it is very useful to be able to view the text as a continuous isolated thread, as well as seeing what it looks like in the final form. The best thing I can recommend is to create a saved search for each of these threads. Use some form of meta-data to keep them all separate (I used keywords, like “threadOrigin”), set up a saved keyword search for that phrase. Then you can simply double-click on that search in the Binder and use Edit Scrivenings to view the whole thread in order. I see that at least your threads do not jump about within themselves (no C2 - C4 - C1), so that should work fine.
Interesting. I guess for now the actual structure of the project should be its eventual printed structure, rather than my intuition, which would have it remain [AAAAA][BBBB][CCCC] until the bits are written and ready to be sequenced.
I would say that is all a matter of personal taste. Scrivener lets you have it either way. Personally I like to write “threaded.” I find that if I write a plot thread all by itself, it takes a lot more work to get it playing with the other bits of the story. If you write it already integrated (as much as possible) you have your finger on the pulse of it all. It also can make for some continuity jumps, but I find those much easier to solve than the types of issues where you have an extremely awkward scene composition and no good way to sort it out without dramatically changing the flavour of the story. I use annotations at the beginning and end of every scene jump which briefly state what happened and what needs to happen next. Then when I collect a plot thread into Edit Scrivenings, it is super easy to skim through the entire thread and make sure all of the many pieces are welded up as they should be, since these hint annotations will be jammed up next to each other in the display.
Why not use saved searches for this? Each thread could have its own keyword (or you could use the label or status for this). Then you would set up a saved search for that keyword (or whatever). Currently, saved searches can only reside in the root of the binder and have to be double-clicked upon to re-run that search and present the search table in place of the binder. But in the next update they are a little more flexible. They can be placed inside folders and also, when you click on a saved search in the binder, you see the results in the corkboard or outliner view in the editor (or you can still double-click to re-run the search in the search table). So you could have a saved search for each thread. You could then arrange the actual documents in the Draft folder in the order you thought they would go in eventually. A saved search shows documents in the same order they appear in the Draft, so you would just see a thread in order without the other documents not linked to that thread… Hope that makes sense.
All the best,
Keith
Yes, what Keith explained is what I was intending to recommend. I might have been a bit too brief in my explanation of it, but this is precisely the method that I use with great success. It takes thinking about things a bit differently at first, but once you get into the flow of it, you can view the Binder as having these sorts of saved “views” that allow you to analyse your work from any number of perspectives. I prefer the keyword method as well, for plot threads, as I like to save labels and status for other things which require greater “top level” visibility.
This strikes me as a great approach to threading plotlines and characters, and apparently it will get even better in the next version. But will saved searches in 1.5 still have text, note,and synopsis fields as they do now? I’m using the search’s own fields to plan out a thread’s ideas and notes while placing separate keyworded docs in the draft folder.
While I’m at it, is there any chance the next version will have somewhat more solid Scrivener Links in text and note fields? The fact that formatting and moving a link’s text tends to destroy its link is pretty annoying.
Thanks for a great program, great to see it’s still being improved.