I just downloaded Scrivener a few days ago, and would LOVE to use it, but the degree of difficulty I’ve encountered getting started is beginning to outweigh my infatuation with what I imagine the program can do. I ran the tutorial once, enough to pick up a few things and to know that it’s going to be a steep learning curve. Now I am unable to go back to it, for some reason. It’s blank when I get there, or I can coax it into an introduction and no more.
I have an existing document, 126,000 words, that I would like to import into Scrivener. I put it through Notepad first to clean up formatting, but I am having a terrifically difficult time managing it in Scrivener. I saw a video that said to use “import and split” but I do not seem to have that option.
I need a mentor. Someone who can come over to my house. Someone who can talk to me on the phone. Someone who can start with me from the beginning and help. I am sort of kidding, but sort of not.
Hello there,
The tutorial itself can be quite overwhelming. Try just starting up scrivener and create a blank project. Call it test or whatever and have a play around. It will have just the basic draft folder with one document, the research folder and trash. These are the minimum default (although they can be renamed to whatever suits your project.) Build on this by importing some text to the single document. Import and split are seperate functions; you import some text and then split it where you wish. This will split to give you another document making it more manageable. Playing around with Scrivener helps with the basics and then build upon this as you grow more familiar. I would find where it has put the tutorial you loaded up and delete it prior to loading it again (The tutorial that is.) Then try the tutorial again when you are a little more familiar. Good luck… it will be worth the effort.
Note that Ctrl+K is split (everything on or below the current line goes into a new text below the current text) and Ctrl+Shift+K is split with selection as title (splits, but whatever is selected appears in the new text and is copied as the title of the new text). Splitting is generally faster with keystrokes than menus.
Also helps if you’ve put in a scene divider (like # or ### on a line by itself) you can find it and split find next and split until I’m tired of splitting, then name the scenes, then organize the named scenes, then assign status and POV for all the scenes, then conform format, then extract notes, then build synopses. For me, this approached seemed to work faster than performing all the steps on a single scene at a time because I could concentrate on a single type of function. YMMV.
FWIW, I was in “experimenting” mode for a while and only split part of my WIP so I could get a feel for Scrivener. I ended up keeping it, but part of my WIP is still a big unsplit text at the end of the split work because I haven’t worked on it for a while, so haven’t needed to split it yet.
If it’s a more detailed and assisted learning process you are after, I can point you in the direction of Gwen Hernandez. ( www.gwenhernandez.com )
Gwen runs Scrivener courses for both Mac and Windows platforms and I understand that people who have been on them speak very highly of the experience. Gwen is also the author of the book “Scrivener for Dummies”, which might be worth a read.
Other than that, for specific queries, this forum is a useful and very patient resource.
On the “Import and Split” (which is a function that lets you automatically split a document based on a specific character string) issue… that one is Mac only, I’m afraid. However, the Ctrl-K (“Split at selection”) function suggested above should serve you nicely.
