I’m using the character documents in the standard template, but I’m running more and more into the issue that I need to reference certain key scenes in my story to get tings right later. Obviously, copying them all to the character document is a bad idea, but on the other hand, the raw information is not always enough to match what a character said in which way earlier.
I thought about making a document listing those moments with chapter links (“meeting Sam, chapter 18”, “fight with the troll, chapter 22”, …) But that’s stuff one does when using a typewriter…
So, how do you keep track of key scenes to find them again later? I already tried those bookmarks, but they don’t do a good job of presenting the content they are linking to and a flat list is not that nice, too.
This is one of the tasks I use keywords and custom metadata to support.
I’ll give each character their own keyword, and I’ll tag their character sheet with that keyword. For each scene where that character is an active participant, I’ll add their keyword to that scene.
I might also create my own custom metadata to mark specific turning points and which character they’re for. That way, I can use project searches for either the keyword or the turning point as needed.
I’ll also use annotations, the inspector notes, and comments as needed to help me remember which scenes were crucial for that character’s development or where I felt I’d done the best job of fleshing out their details.
One of the reasons I don’t structure my draft in chapters is that when I did, I found it very difficult to edit – mostly for the reasons you mention. Often finding the point to edit was straightforward, but its impacts, and the ripple-effect of changing those, often became overwhelming.
I struggled with this for quite a while until I heard Philip Pullman say that he doesn’t structure by chapters until the book is being prepared for publishing. That day, I save my project, and then set about structuring my draft by character arc – other choices are available – and using Scrivener’s colour-coding in the Binder to facilitate locating scenes. This was a game-changer for me, and I’ve never looked back.
[Note: I change the Project’s Label Title to Arc; rename the Labels; and tick Use Arc (Label) Colour in Binder.]
In addition, though this isn’t essential, I also keep a timeline of the story. When the timeline is arranged by arc, it’s easy to associate scenes with events in the story, and it’s also a good place to spot potential problems.
My advice to anyone writing fiction – non-fiction is completely different – is to ditch chapters till you need them.
That’s pretty good advice, although the effect is limited depending on writing style.
For me, the main structure is the “day”—there’s a short “interlude” chapter each in-story day at 5:03 am. The “chapters” in one day, I split to be around 2,500 words as I target serial publication—but at this stage it’s more about having smaller documents, not yet about those being the final chapters. However, in most cases, that’s a already only single scene, only rarely do I have a smaller scene hat’s paired off with a longer one. (2,500 words isn’t much when you have 4 characters chatting all the time…)
And as this nails everything that happens to a specific date, time and order, I won’t be doing much reshuffling later. That is much easier to do when the story happens while the characters live their lives “off screen”, not when you follow them around all the time.
This also makes keywords, as RuthS suggested, not that useful. My 4 primaries are together nearly constantly. The scenes/chapters/locations where the secondaries show up I can track fairly well by searching for their names, so far.
However, that reminds me that I’m still misusing the notes as a quick reference for names and dates—that was useful when the story still was a single document in my “story ideas” project, but I should have moved that stuff to a reference document ages ago. Sometimes keeping doing what you’ve done all the time blindsights you…
I like keywords as can have multiple pee document so could search for bob and bill and get a scene list where both occur. I tie this to comments to highlight key information. I keep a central character profile ( I did this on scapple) but if had a character card could update card as add info and note where point occurred so update character card as write and can float as a QRP as write a scene for that character.
I still haven’t cleanup my notes, but I have started to write little “bonus chapters” background stories for some secondary characters. Those, in addition to the character sketches I do anyway, have helped me a lot in that they make it less necessary to look up what people told others about themselves. Most of the searching for prior scenes I had to do for those characters was to check if they already revealed something about themselves, no longer about about “ground truth facts”. I would not have expected simple 400-word-life-stories (shorter than most character sketches I have) to have such a huge impact.
It doesn’t fully alleviate my desire to be able to put “map pins” at certain paragraphs, but I’m no longer in a mode where I get hold up by having to search for stuff all the time.
But it makes me wish for a tabbed window for stuff opened as Quick Reference. (And that right-clicking a document in the explorer tree wouldn’t show it in the main editor.)
Yeah, that right-clicking behavior is unintuitive and non-standard, at least on the Windows platform. It’s one of those instances where Scrivener as a tool gets in the way for me. I find most of the interface navigation methods in Scriv well-considered, even elegant, but this one’s a real head scratcher. I’ve no idea what the devs were thinking when they implemented this behavior.
To get around it, I’ve disabled Binder navigation via Navigate > Binder Selection Affects > None.
With this setting, right-clicking a binder item displays the right-click menu without changing the Editor contents.
Left-clicking only selects the binder item. To take action on it, depending on whether I’m in a keyboarding mood or a mousing mood, I can then:
Launch it as a QuickRef panel by pressing the spacebar or dragging & dropping it onto the Quick Reference button
Open in the Active Editor via Alt+Shift+O or dragging & dropping it to the Editor header
Open in the Inactive Editor via Ctrl+Shift+O or dragging & dropping it to the Editor header
I actually pare with Scrivener and have character cards with most details and update as add details in the story that add to the character and name scene and act it occurs in and pin it with a comment. So once I know the scene the comment leads me to the spot in the scene where the new info was introduced.