How to organize a screenplay in Scrivener?

Hi!
I have started to use Scrivener for my script. I’m very new at this, so I’m struggling to find a neat way of organizing it. Some scenes are too short, for instance as the characters change location of the time. I don’t even know how I should title each “new text” and “new folder” I create. I tried to use numbers at first, but for the sake of the plot I’m starting to move scenes around… Is there a simpler way of doing it?

Hi. Welcome to the forum. :slight_smile:

Personally, during the early stages of composition (when, like you, I’ll move things around and am still figuring the story out) I title my documents a sentence that shortly describe the essence of what goes on in the scene/document. (I make my binder wide to accommodate such.)

Scenes that I want to stick together, I nest them in the first one. (I am far from compiling, so binder structure doesn’t matter much at this point.)

If you want to try out different orders of scenes, collections are the way to go about it. They allow to have alternative documents’ order, or to isolate specific scenes. (Note that edits done to a document within a collection are done to the original document. When a document is in a collection, it is not a duplicate ; it is the original ; and edits will reflect everywhere ; in other collections too, as well as in the binder.)

You can also use labels to color-code specific documents in the binder.
You can also use icons, alternatively, or to provide a second layer of “labeling”.

You can link to a scene within a scene, by dragging and dropping the target document from the binder to the editor in the scene where you want the clickable link to be.

. . . . . . . . . .
There are plenty of other ways to go about that stage.
Using the synopsis panel and the corkboard view is another.

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Numbering your scenes by hand will pretty much always turn out to be inconvenient.

And of course keywords and custom metadata (they play very nice with collections or “just” the outliner). You may not know how to call your scene as a document title—and you don’t have to do that at all—or in what order you end up presenting it, but writing it without knowing the who, where (and to some extent when) etc. is next to impossible.