Hi.
I wonder what you would think of the best solution for my task.
I have almost finished my first draft now. Since I have a tendency to make to much narration and skip the description, I am planning to make a kind of brainstorm for each scene, where I jot down all sensual aspects that come to mind. I don´t want to do these right in the text, so that I do not get distracted by the question of how to integrate it into the existing text. Later on I want to copy & paste a few of the best fitting descriptions into the existing text.
So I want to have a corresponding brainstorm document for each scene that I can easily access and interweave with the existing scenes. I think of making subdocuments or links to the research folder or using the synopsis field or the notes… Since there are so many possibilities, I´d like your ideas which way will be the most fluent before I start.
I’d go with document notes and in-line annotations, if you’re not using them for anything else. The synopsis is better used for a high-level view of each document (often to do with that scene’s plot/section’s topic). The advantage to in-line annotations is that they’re visible in the text, and can act as place-holders for where to put more description. Using both in-line annotations and document notes, you should be able to make the most of your brain-storming sessions.
Depending on how elaborate or complex details are, you might also be able to use custom meta-data; that, or keywords, could indicate – for instance – that you had neglected for a long time to mention the weather, or the colors of the foliage, or the sound of traffic, whatever is important to your overall narrative.
Thanks for your replies. The document notes would be a prominent place, but I use them already. I have some synopsises (is that the plural?) but I could delete them, now that the scenes are written (title is enough for me to know whats going on in the scene).
The in-line annotations don´t fit my needs. I don´t want to see the existing text while brainstorming, because I know that this would make me think about how to fit the new descriptions into the text and limit my flow. But after the brainstorm is done, I want to have it close to the scenes, to see what I can use of it and copy it into it.
Maybe I should put the brainstorms in a folder in research and link them to the corresponding scene. This should be less complicated than having subdocuments which are excluded from compile, shouldn´t it?
I would use subdocuments. That’s a little more complex at compile time, but they’re a little easier to find if you want to incorporate them into the text. (Even temporarily, with something like Scrivenings mode.)
I would also take full advantage of Scrivener’s Merge and Split features. Remember that you can split a chapter into as many chunks as you like, and put the results of your brainstorming right next to the chunk to which it applies.
If you go with sub-documents, I’d take full advantage of Document templates, setting the text font for those documents to be distinct from your main narrative’s settings, and also un-selecting the template’s “include in compile” check-mark (see the inspector). That way, you don’t have to keep stumbling upon your notes when you compile later. If you situate it as the first document template, you can even use a keyboard shortcut whenever you plan to create a new one.