I am a new user. When I try to create chapters (called Parts), the side panel mostly creates scenes. I don’t want scenes in most chapters except 2 very long ones. How can I format Parts as chapters without scenes? Thanks! Michelle
Hi, Michelle, and welcome to the Scrivener forums! Fellow Scrivener user here.
In a Scrivener project, there are two main sorts of things you make in the Binder: container folders and text documents. The first thing to realize is that these do not have any actual fixed or built-in relation to parts, chapters, and scenes. That’s because there are many ways to work.
When you say the side panel (Binder) “mostly creates scenes”, I think you mean text documents (which in the kind of project you asked for may have a default name ‘scene’). You definitely do want text documents in your project, because this is where the body of your text goes – whether you think of it as coming in scenes or not! You can rename the doc anything you want – it won’t change anything functionally – it is just a text document no matter what it is named.
In common nomenclature Parts and Chapters are just divisions in a text. That is, there is a total text body and it is merely divided into Chapters, and the groups of chapters into separate Parts. Parts and Chapters are very naturally represented by folders. The body text of your work will be in text documents.
It sounds like you may have created a project using the Novel With Parts template. This is no doubt set up with a canonical idea in mind: A novel that comes in several Parts, each of which is probably broken into Chapters, and each chapter consisting probably of several discrete passages of text – in a novel these are usually scenes. On this model your Binder might look like this
folder: Part I - Meet Nancy Drew
folder Chapter 1 - Nancy at Home
text doc: Nancy and and her chum have luncheon
text doc: they have tea & talk about the weather
etc.
folder: Chapter 2 - An Unexpected Call
text doc: Nancy gets a strange phone call
text doc: Nancy drives to Riverside Heights
etc.
folder: Part II: Nancy is on the Case
folder: Chapter 1: Trouble Brewing
text doc: Nancy overhears the crooks
etc.
etc.
So, text documents inside chapter folders inside parts folders. The content of the novel is all in the text documents. The folders just group things together in nice ways, and the Novel With Parts project template is set up to recognize the first level folders as representing the novels Parts, the next level of folders its Chapters, and the text documents the body text that goes in the chapters. (You can break the text docs into a large or small a pieces as you like – they need not represent different scenes in the traditional sense.)
If that is not the way you want to structure your manuscript, then you wil need to adapt how you use that particular project set up. For example, if one of the Parts of your manuscript is not to be broken into chapters, then just put text docs of body text into that Part folder.
OR maybe you want to start with a blank project instead of a prefab one that doesn’t suit what you are doing.
I would strongly urge you to walk through the interactive tutorial – it is a built-in “teaching” Scrivener project available from the Help menu. It will teach you some useful terminology and some basic concepts about how Scrivener works. Honestly worth it!
In the meantime, if you just want to get writing, just create text documents and start typing in them. Once you get your bearings you can arrange them into the appropriate folders and maybe split some of them up, if you realize you didn’t divvy things up just right.
5 Likes