Ah, so am I able to export it based on a collection with the keywords and leave the inherent structure disorganized or would I have to eventually put it in order anyways?
Either. You can either export (as individual files) or compile (into a single document) any selection of files from the Binder in any order.
Now, if your ultimate goal is to produce a single publishable manuscript containing all 400,000 words, your task will be easier if the order in the Binder reflects the order you’d like to see in the finished document. But on your way to that point it’s very easy to, for example, produce two different output documents in order to see what structure works best without changing the underlying Binder structure. Or to pull out scenes with a particular character in order to see that character’s plot arc. Etc.
Katherine
If I’m understanding this correctly, you have one document like, say, a Word document and it is either a) not in narrative order; or b) in narrative order, and you’re worried about splitting it up. Is that the basic problem?
In addition to what’s been said above, I’d recommend you do start chopping it up and organising asap because - well - Scrivener exists to make your writing life easier, and I’m sure you’ll get far more out of it if you modify your way of working (slightly).
For starters: If your scenes are in different character POVs, I’d label them as such and colour-code them; you can then add those POVs to collections if need be.
If your MS is in chronological/narrative order, you can divide up sections (or chapters if you prefer) into more manageable chunks, label folders as chapters and within them have document ‘scenes’ (with descriptive names) and/or POVs.
E.G. My WIP is set across 5 distinct historical periods (and one period includes an epistolary side-narrative) but they will be split up within the final novel rather than organised in unbroken periods of time. How I have them organised in Scrivener, however, is in complete order in their own time periods. When I’ve finished writing the last time period, I can then drag and drop folders and documents into the order I want. To do that as one long document would be nigh-on impossible.
Sorry if I 'm confusing or repeating things that have been said already.
I have a somewhat similar problem. I have some 200 chapters that cover a variety of settings with elements that I need to put in proper order as I shift things around and change emphasis. After trying various approaches, I decided to use collections, because I need to have the full text of each collection that I can view as one “document” to find if I’ve kept the development in the right order. Corkboard and outliner views won’t do.
However, I find that when I choose to view a particular collection (such as “lab,” which includes all chapters that take place in and around or feeding into a hospital lab), they don’t show in the same order as they would in the ms. in the binder–in fact they seem fairly random. This won’t work for me at all. Is there some way I can goose the collections so that the chapters always fall in the same order as they would in the overall ms?
Are you using manual or smart collections? The docs in a smart collection (being procedurally determined) always show In Binder-order.
gr
Thanks. I’m using manual, didn’t note there were smart collections. If I understand this rightly, I’ll need to go back and make sure all keywords for each chapter are the same as the collection names I want to use, then do a search on each keyword. Took me three days to set up the collections first go-round. I assume there’s no way to convert a standard to a smart collection?
You don’t need to redo what you have done. The command you are looking for is Edit > Sort > Collection into Binder Order.
gr
The reason you (mjw) were asked if you’d done the tutorial is that you seem to be abstaining from one of the primary reasons that people adopt Scrivener for long-form writing and structural revision. This baffles those of us who hated trying to do things with one long document (as with most word processors), so the advice here is almost always going to be “split up your work into smaller documents”. Note that you don’t have to split it up, but if you don’t, you’re missing out on a number of features that make Scrivener so powerful a tool for writing long form.
Here are a number of things that splitting your manuscript into individual chapter documents buys you:
- You can stop numbering your chapters manually, instead letting Scrivener do that during the compile step. This helps you if you might split a chapter up, or if you add or remove chapters, since you don’t have to do the tedious task of re-numbering all the remaining chapters.
- By not naming your binder items “Chapter 1” and so-forth, that frees up those titles for something more descriptive (which doesn’t have to end up in your final manuscript; these titles can be just for your benefit): Arthur meets Merlin; The Lady of the Lake; Lancelot + Guinevere; The Round Table…
- The outline view lets you see synopses that you create for each chapter/scene. This lets you get a bird’s eye view of each document and what (in brief) happens therein. “Lancelot falls in love with Guinevere, but she rebuffs him despite her attraction” ; “Some knights struggle with the concept of the round table, rejecting the idea of anyone having equal say with the king”…
- “Scrivenings mode” lets you string together multiple documents in one editor, so you can read it continuously. You can even split the editor into two, with an outline showing titles + synopses, and the other editor loading whichever chapter you click on, so you can easily jump from one to the other without scrolling for hundreds of thousands of words.
- As you revise a chapter, you can mark its status as “Major restructuring”, “Character voice revisions”, “continuity checking”, “final polish”, “done”, viewing those statuses in the outliner (or as stamps on the cork board), so you can view your progress and tell where you left off.
- Keywords, applied to each chapter, let you list all of the people who appear in that scene, significant objects that appear (or are discussed) therein (Excalibur, for instance). You can then search on keywords and show only those chapters that are tagged with it, which may reveal that you forgot about something that seemed important until about 1/2 way through the book, but which you accidentally dropped. Or maybe it tells you that you need to remove all references to that object (or that person) during revision.
- Document notes are a good place to plan what needs to change in this chapter specifically, versus the larger-scale changes. Or maybe it’s just a more-indepth version of the synopsis, including sub-plot info.
- Custom meta-data is a great way to track sub-plot progression. One column per sub-plot lets you see (in outline view) which chapters advance that sub-plot, how many chapters it takes to pick up that sub-plot, or where it comes to its own conclusion within the main plot (which is tracked using the main synopsis field).
You get none of these potential benefits if you keep everything in one huge document. Thus, why we Scrivener aficionados keep suggesting that splitting up a long manuscript into at least one document per chapter. It’s just the best (but not the ONLY) way to take advantage of Scrivener; if you want to go your own way, you’ll just have to figure out how to bend Scrivener to your methods–few enough other people keep 600k words in one document that you won’t find many here who can help you.
Question: ”How do I keep track of my chapters if I have to break them down in dozens of documents?”
The simple answer that no one seems to have given is - you make your chapters into folders, which can have the name you want the chapters to have, and can split the content within your chapters into chunks with names that describe e.g the plot, which don’t print when you compile the output.
Maybe it’s because I’m using version 2.9 (haven’t updated my Mac OS), but this command doesn’t seem to be available.
If you decide to “convert”, then it won’t be so bad as you might think. Here’s what you can do:
- Create a keyword* for one of your manual collections.
- Open the keywords floating panel. (I think you can do this from the keywords panel of the Inspector for one document… sorry, don’t recall the details fo v1)
- Open your first manual collection, select all of the documents therein (CTRL-a after clicking on one of them).
- Drag your keyword onto one of the selected documents.
- Verify that the keyword was applied to all of the selected documents.
- Repeat for every manual collection.
Once you’ve done that (it looks a lot worse written out than it will be in practice), with the keyword floating panel open, select one of the keywords, and use the search icon in the floating window to bring up a search of all documents with that keyword assigned. Then in the search field (I think this is in the toolbar in v1?) click on the loupe icon; at the very bottom, there should be an option to save your search. Save it and then you can get rid of the manual collection of the same documents. The search results are always in the same order as they are in the binder.
These saved searches will refresh every time you change views to either the binder and back, or to another collection and back, so any documents that gain or lose that keyword will change the save search results when you return to that “smart collection”.
[size=85]* Note that if you don’t have documents that need multiple keywords, you might consider using the Label metadata for this, since you can then color-code the icons, or the entire title in the Binder, as well as using those same colors for the index cards in cork board mode.[/size]