I am having some issues with outlining my story consistently and would love to use Scrivener’s functionalities better. The main issue I have is the following:
I am outlining my story in chapters in the outline section of my binder, where I do not put the actual text, but the chapter titles, some synopsis, labels for the point of view, and some notes on my writing process. Then, I have the manuscript section, where I have documents for each chapter (basically copies of the ones in the outline, but with the actual content of the story saved in the document itself, and less meta data attached to it).
I would love to link these two documents: when I change e.g. a chapter title or the chapter order in my outline, I would like for the title of the respective chapter in my manuscript to change as well, or the chapter order in my manuscript to automatically also change. I have tried to find a solution for this, but linking documents doesn’t seem to solve my problem, because it creates hyperlinks or reference links, not active links where a change in one document also changes the same thing in the other document (but it’s entirely possible that I haven’t understood how to use the feature correctly).
Maybe there is also a better way to outline / create a manuscript. I am open for input and happy to try out a leaner version of outlining if anybody has suggestions!
Thanks a lot in advance and my apologies if this has been discussed elsewhere!
There’s your issue. The Binder is this “outline section”. It does all those things that you try to reinvent by default. Titles, order, etc. If you let it. Put the actual text there. Problem solved.
You certainly can link outline items together, and quite usefully so. The tool you are looking for is Document Bookmarks.[1]
You can get to the feature with the Navigate ▸ Inspect ▸ Bookmarks, which you will note has a shortcut, or with the mouse, clicking on the blue ‘i’ inspector button in the toolbar, and then the bookmark tab.
Check the header bar, and if it says “Project Bookmarks” click it and switch to “Document Bookmarks”, or press Ctrl6 / ⌘6
As the help text says in the top portion of the view…
Once you’ve done that, you’ll note the most powerful part of this feature, in how the lower part of the sidebar is a full editor.
That all said, I am in complete agreement with the above. I would need a really strong reason to have two separate but nearly identical outlines in my binder. That sounds like a lot of unnecessary overhead. The great thing about Scrivener’s approach is that your outline and your text are one and the same. You describe the content of your text right on top of it, rather than having to use separate lists, views or even software, to manage and understand your text. Here is a post walking someone through how I outline in the user manual project, which touches on some practical techniques as well for easily flipping between outline and text views.
I definitely do use separate outlines, but when I do it is for very different purposes. For example, this post describes a way of tracking editing tasks. I link to that one specifically because it is also a good practical demonstration of the document bookmarks feature.
If your main concern about outlining in the draft itself is coming from how you’ve had to do things in word processors, then a good thing to know is that Scrivener’s compile system has been designed specifically to allow outlines to be more detailed, to maybe only partially represent, the heading structure your reader will see (chapter breaks, etc.). It is also entirely possible to have areas of the draft folder that don’t export at all, meaning you can keep notes and text right alongside each other rather than completely different areas of the binder. In Word, yeah, you have an outliner, but it is very strictly slaved to book structure, and you thus cannot use it to describe your text in a way that is meaningful to you, only in a way that is meaningful to the reader. Scrivener is the complete opposite.
§10.3, Project and Document Bookmarks, in the user manual PDF. ↩︎
If you haven’t already, I’d recommend taking a look at our Interactive Tutorial, available from the Help menu. It has a detailed explanation of how the parts of the Scrivener interface work together.
Thanks all, for taking the time to help me with this! I will take a close look at the resources you linked and mentioned and will try to implement your suggestions. It sounds like I can make much better use of Scriveners potential in the future.
Worth mentioning also: Instead of maintaining separate notes documents associated with your outline structure elements, each text document in Scriv has a built-in Notes area off to the side in the Inspector pane. Super useful.
Also, the Outline View gives you an expanded view of your Binder structure and additional tools for working with it.
