I’m stuck with a small dilema here, and hoping for some tips.
I’ve got a large novel, all nicely laid out. Recently I’ve decided to try a different tack on my first chapter. It’s easy enough to have it in the project, and simply un-tick “include in manuscript” on the old first chapter.
But as I get into the details, I realize there’s small ripple effects throughout the book. So, I also need to have alternate verisons of later chapters, with minor edits.
Mind you, I’m just trying to get a feel for this change before wholly committing to it. And, all the while I’m still making minor changes here and there to the old chapter(s). Because of that, I don’t want to split this into two separate scrivener projects if I can avoid it.
So my question is, how do you manage competing versions of chapters/text within your scrivener projects? My solution right now is to duplicate the part I want to make an alternate version of, and put “ALT” in front of the name. This allows me to see them easily when compiling, and either tick or untick the ALT versions, depending on which one I want.
However, it can get cumbersome as the amount of them grow, and feels a little sloppy to me. Is there a better way?
I do it by stepping up one level and making an alternate folder there. So if I have:
Chapter
Section 1
Section 2
and want to play with an alternative version of Section 1, I’ll create
Alternative Chapter
Section 1 (Alt)
Section 2 (Alt)
That lets me keep the base version totally intact and un-messed with, while I can do whatever I want with the secondary version. By keeping the alternative version in a completely separate set of folders, I make it very easy to keep track of which files belong to which version.
And Scrivener being Scrivener, it’s of course trivially easy to drag the alternative sections back to the main branch as needed.
Have you considered looking into snapshots since the 2.0 version has come out? If you name each snapshot “ALT version1”, “OLD version1”… then it can be a simple matter to compare any two versions side-by-side using the enhanced snapshots features, and the naming conventions can just be part of your snapshot process.
I had thought about snapshots, but that doesn’t really accomplish what I want to do. I’m not wanting to compare one version with the other in an editing sense. I’m more interested in being able to compile the manuscript with one flavor or the other, and work on both simultaneously, until I ultimately decide which direction is right.
Snapshots would really only let me have one version “live” at a time, and bouncing back and forth could get ugly.
I do like Katherine’s idea of keeping the chapters fully intact, rather than mixing two versions within the same folder. The only trick there is if “Section 1” is the same in both, I’d have to remember to make edits in both places. I suppose that’s a problem even if they are just slightly different, so I’ll need to watch out for that.
If I were to attempt two alternative revisions, I’d probably duplicate the entire manuscript (name one ALT-Manuscript) and then swap them in and out of the Research folder when it was time to compile. That way I wouldn’t have to toggle the flags for compiling, and it would be easy to compare each in a side-by-side editor view. I would also create special revision labels for the ALT manuscript, so I could tell at a glance which documents were changed to accommodate my alternative beginning.
I’m a novelist who spends most of her time endlessly rewriting. I solve the problem of different versions of chapters by opening a new folder each time I start a new draft. The folders are named 1st Draft, 2nd Draft . . . 7th Draft and they contain a subset of Chapter folders divided into scenes. I use various labels on my scenes and chapters, depending on where I am in the writing process, but by the time I reach a major rewrite I’m using the labels 1st. . .7th Draft, with different colours. The label colours are shown in the Binder, so it’s easy to look down the Binder list and see what documents are at which stage of rewriting: 1st Draft is pink, 6th Draft is turquoise blue, 7th Draft is olive green. When I’m rewriting a chapter/scene I duplicate it (Command D) and move the duplicate to the new folder before working on it. If I change my mind about my rewrite I can easily revert to one of the previous draft versions.
It sounds complicated, but all I do is glance at the Binder where all is made clear by the colours of the Labels. The Label colours can also be shown in the Outliner, too, which gives another way of looking at the complete work.
It’s this ability to see the complete work-in-progress in different ways that makes Scrivener invaluable, I find. It reduces the feeling of being overwhelmed by plot and sub-plots, pace and suspense, characters and dialogue, and gives me a feeling of being in control of the big picture so that I can focus on the single paragraph I’m working on.
As I’m currently on the 7th Draft I’ve moved the previous six versions to a folder in Research called Archive so that the Draft folder (renamed Manuscript) just contains the 7th and, I hope, final version. But the previous drafts are still available and easy to distinguish if I need them.