Empty – Nothing written yet, placeholder in the binder.
Main Idea – Core concept explained.
Few Ideas – Key points or sentences providing the essential and some side ideas.
Draft Start – Prose writing is taking shape, the first go.
Draft zero – A rough draft with all the key points, missing wrapping like setting, etc.
Drafted – A first full draft, still with many issues annotated.
Refined 1 – Solved the prominent and easiest issues, filling in the gaps.
Refined 2 – Another pass done to address more issues.
Complete – Section written. No placeholders or missing content. Readable by others.
Reviewed – Section has received external feedback and been revised accordingly.
Other stages:
Regressions: Three size of rework to do on a Refined 1 or higher stage (the bigger the darker)
Rework L
Rework M
Rework S
When at least stage Refined 1 but I noticed a couple of descriptions are missing for the setting (or some similar independent addition to provide), and it’s back to the normal progress after that:
Missing desc
Note: Documents aren’t going through all 10 stages, in general only 1 or 2 before the Refined 1.
I’m curious to know how you get an idea of the remaining amount of work you have. (if it something of a concern to you)
I should add this:
I guess that after my first full draft for the whole story, I’ll downgrade all the sections to a new scale for the revision and editing phases. This progress list of values is for an early stage, overall.
And for the novels, I use the Outline view columns to keep track of things in the old “Who, What, Where, When” with “Keywords” columns being the “Who” since you can’t change that column header; I haven’t needed (so far) any “Why” or “How” columns.
The other way is to take the same categories and assign as keywords and create a number of collections like nothing, lots of work etc. and can pullup the collection and change the keyword as you progress and if collections are dynamic they will shrink or grow based on your progress.
Not used now:
This list was superseded by the Progress list (old name: label) with the colors.
I’m not sure if I’ll need another metadata like that with only one value per document.
For me, fourteen stages would be rather too many – creating too much of a management task – and would also invoke too-subtle color gradations in the labeling. And here I thought I was really going at it with just six! Or maybe my needs are just very simple. FWIW, here are my stock “progress” labels:
I use Label as Arc; usually character, but also multiple characters when they journey together. So: Fred, Dino, Fred+Dino is three arcs. I use Label because it can show in the Binder.
For information triggers, I use icons on text and folder items in the Binder.
I’d be more than happy for more information to be available in the Binder, but I know this isn’t Keith’s way, so make do best I can. I only use the Inspector stuff for Snapshots, and only open it when editing.
To some extent, as far as I’m aware. But it doesn’t show whether notes are present, or bookmarks, or comments.
Also, when editing, and generally using two editing panes, it’s not possible – at least easily, as far as I recall – to have all three panes present at once: two text editing plus the Outline view.
Basically, I’d like a simple visual cue that there’s something present. I don’t need the content to be visible at the top level.
I understand that. It’s still new for me, so I’ll see in the long run if there are the drawbacks you mention.
I agree that the color difference for the greenish ones isn’t clear with a quick glance. It still gives an overall feeling, and if I focus a little bit I can see it well. So for that part I’m fine for the moment.
About the sheer number of stages: I didn’t want that many and I’m not using all of them for all the documents. It’s just to reflect the initial state of each documents after migrating into Scrivener, and I felt it wouldn’t have been ‘fair’ to lump together documents with different degree of progression. Thus this number of progress stages.
There’s actually 10 stages in the continuous progress, not counting special ones. Typically, from now on, a document would start at one early stage between 1-5, then jump to an intermediate stage in 4-6, and land somewhere in 7-9 for a while.
Another way to do it that is visual is with icons. You can use png files. I find geometric shapes of various colors are very helpful. see the example below. (could combine techniques for the harder to read colors)
This progress list of values is for an early stage, overall.
