I’ve been using Scrivener for a long time, but primarily as a drafting tool. Now that I’m sitting down and trying to edit the huge novel-shaped-piles-of-words I have accumulated, I have been struggling to manage my notes and edits. I’ve tried printing out and marking up on paper, working directly in Scrivener, keeping a spreadsheet, Trello boards etc. Nothing is quite sticking.
So, here’s my dream feature/workflow:
- I finish my draft and load it into the iPad version of Scrivener
- I switch iPad Scrivener into ‘Reading/Comment mode’, based perhaps on the Draft Navigator view, or maybe a full screen view. In this mode, tapping on the screen always brings up a selection box and comment window, so I can read and mark up my copy with comments.
- As I work, I can categorise each comment (plot issue, chronology, rewrite, oh god I hate this character), adding new categories on the fly as I need them.
- When I open up the same project in Mac Scrivener, I can see the comments and their categories and I can jump from comment to comment within a category - for example, I could work through all of the ‘Chronology of Day 1’ comments, one after the other, working non-linearly through the project.
Blue sky:
Maybe being able to see the comments in a single view and filter them by category? A kanban board might be taking it too far…
Maybe I could mark a comment as in-progress or done?