I’m a Scrivener newbie trying to use the program for my second novel. I went through the interactive tutorial but I’m still very clueless. I’ve got 50 thousand words in MSWord and I want to port it to Scrivener so each chapter has it’s own index card. First I port the chapters to Notepad, then into Scrivener. Sometimes I have to do that step twice to get rid of all formatting, but then it’s okay. And I create index cards by using new text. Somewhere in there I created some extra cards that aren’t connected to text. How do you erase cards? Delete cards? What is the most straightforward way to do what I’m trying to do?
Also, each chapter follows a different main character. Can I put a colored tab on the cards to indicate which character is in that chapter? And could I then call up a view of only the cards relating to one character?
You shouldn’t need to convert via notepad. You can import the Word file directly into scrivener. Then you can do cut and “paste and match style,” which will match your scrivener file. Or you can save as plain text in Word, then import that into Scrivener, which is what you’re doing with Notepad.
Each card is linked to a file in the binder. So you have to delete that document from the binder to get it to not show up on the corkboard.
What you’re doing with characters would probably be a task better suited to keywords. (There are numerous threads about using them already.)
If you have you MS Word manuscript as one large file the easiest this to do would be:
- Import the whole file into Scrivener (Ctrl+Shift+J)
- Convert the whole document (currently a single index card) into default format (Documents > Convert > Formatting to Default Text Style…)
- Split the single file using split at selection… Start at the top and work your way down the document. There are two alternative ways to do this:
- Place the cursor where you want the next chapter to begin, and press Ctrl+K to split a the selection
- If you have titles for your chapters in the document already (eg “Chapter Two”) then highlight the text that says that chapter title (eg “Chapter Two”) then press Ctrl+Shift+K to split at the selection with the selected text as the title for the new index card.
- Under both of those options then select the next document in the list and go down and repeat the process until you have split at all your desired points.
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To delete a card…
- highlight the card in the binder on the left hand side of the screen
- press Shift-Del
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You can use keywords to track characters and put coloured labels on cards, and then use collections to show you only those cards.
This is a bit more involved, so have a look through the following forum thread which will give you an idea of how I do this at least.
literatureandlatte.com/forum … 31&t=16255
This post is more about the concept of how to do it rather than the specific steps of how keywords and collections work, though. The manual will be your friend here, plus of course ask more questions here if you get stuck!
Best,
PF
Thanks a lot for your prompt, polite and useful replies to my questions.