it’s a slightly different approach, I guess. We writers have these quirks, I guess, and the tiniest difference looks huge to us.
Something that I do like about Scrivener, that I didn’t really say well above, is that I think it works well for a broader range of writing tasks than traditional outliners do. I phrased it that some tools encourage lots of “bullet points” in their design, whereas Scrivener does not. It’s perfectly valid and possible to have whole chapters in a single “bullet point” in Scrivener, whereas that would be a bit of a mess in Dynalist, OmniOutliner and similar.
I’ve written a fair bit on how I see Scrivener as on par with dedicated outliner tools.
I am thinking now of a book with a lot of one-liners, and I feel, thanks to your explanation, that I should have each line in a separate item/document, if I want to take advantage of Scrivener’s approach.
It’s something to consider, as a way of working that it makes possible. A good example I like to give is glossaries. In a traditional text editor you would type in each glossary entry with some formatting in a continuous text. But in Scrivener it makes a lot of sense to have each term a separate outline element in a “Glossary” folder. You can keep them alphabetised easily, link to them individually from other areas of the text, and so forth. What might seem daunting, working in so many small pieces, is done away with by the Scrivenings editing view.
Anyway, if you want to see how this approach can be taken to scale, in practice, download a copy of the user manual project. The Draft folder has around 2,500 items in it, and while some sections are a bit on the long side, you’ll find many are quite short—and when you get to the appendices like menu and preferences documentation, this “glossary” principle I described above is used almost exclusively, where each checkbox, dropdown and menu command in the software is in its own outline item.
So I think that’s a good demonstration of how you can break things down into great detail where it makes sense to, or have a 2,000 word section over here if that makes more sense, too. If one chapter is fairly straightforward, it can stand on its own, but another might need a dozen “cards” to really break down everything that goes on in it.
