I’m new to Scrivener and I’m writing a non-fiction book to be 80K-100K long. I’m having no trouble using the basic functionality of Scrivener, and have written about 20,000 words, but my notes are getting out of control. Whenever there’s a quote, an idea, or a link I want to save for the book, I put it on an index card. When I remember to, I add some keywords to the index card. But now what? I have hundreds of index cards and no particular way of organizing them or retrieving information from them. Is note-taking / quote-storing supposed to be done somewhere other than the index card system?
There isn’t really a right and wrong way, as long as whatever you’re doing works for you. I’m guessing that there are two ways in which you want to access the data – general browsing to look for information on a particular topic, and specific search for something you know you’ve got somewhere in your notes.
To help with general browsing, the first thing I would do is organise the notes in the binder so that I could see what I had got. Make sure that the notes are organised into nested folders within the Research folder, and that the document title makes sense. How you structure the folders depends on how you would like to access the information. For me, it wouldn’t make sense to have folders called “Quotes”, “Ideas” and “Links” because I would never be disciplined enough to delve through the contents to find what I wanted (I would use keywords or labels to classify the material in this way). Instead, I would choose subject or thematic groups of folders relevant to the topic of my book, subdividing the material logically as though I were sorting stacks of physical index cards into a Rolodex or box organiser with divider cards. I would create as many folders and sub-folders as needed to make sense of the material, so that if I wanted to see what notes I had on, say, Sherlock Holmes, I would instantly know to drill down from “Detectives” to “Fictional” to “Male” (or however I had subdivided it), to find whatever bits and pieces I had collected. I could then choose to browse the document titles in the binder, or switch to the corkboard to display index cards from a particular folder. Alternatively, if I had already finalised my structure, I might prefer to sort the information into structure-oriented folders called “Chapter 1”, “Chapter 2”, “Unplaced”’, “Background”, “Discarded”, and so on. Once the material is sorted logically, so that everything has a place and nothing can get mislaid or overlooked, you can use Collections as a more dynamic/flexible way of viewing the notes.
To help with searching for specific information, I would make sure that document titles are solidly descriptive and (since you have started with a keyword system) that comprehensive keywords are up to date and consistent for each card. Don’t forget that you can add custom meta-data fields to help tag your notes. You can then use project searches to look for particular aspects, and can save these as saved searches which are dynamically updated (see section 20.1.2 of the User Manual for more information). If you use some sort of meta-data field (Label or Status) to mark a note as new when you enter it, and clear that field when it has been incorporated into the text, then you will be able to restrict searches to as-yet-unused notes.
Having said all that, if you have hundreds of notes I think you might be heading into specialist territory, so it might make sense to consider using an external application to manage your notes instead of storing them all within Scrivener. Personally, I use (and highly recommend) DevonThink Pro, but there are other solutions available which all have their advocates. Much depends on the features you want from such a system, on how much classification you want to do, and on whether you are building a larger body of research for future works beyond this individual project.
I hope this gives you some ideas. Good luck with sorting out the tangle! 
Astrid
I was always told “put together what goes together”. A very simple recipe, but harder than it seems. I’d second the advice to use Devonthink. It makes implementation of that simple recipe much easier. Scrivener is great, but when it comes to really heavyweight data handling, I find it gets unwieldy and difficult to find things.
Martin.
Actually, I’m already using DevonThink too! DT gives me the ability to clip things directly from my browser, which is very useful; then I tag those. So that’s where I keep images of articles that I may want to refer to.
Maybe the problem is that in the end I don’t really understand, despite having watched the tutorial, what exactly these programs are for. Is the right place to organize research notes Scrivener or DevonThink? (I have already purchased and learned the basics of both, so I’m fine either way.)
One thing I could do is move the whole apparatus of notes and quotes over to DevonThink and incorporate it into the tag system I already have going there. I’m only 20K words into this book and it’s not too late.
But then the question is – what functionality is Scrivener offering me? If I’m not using it to keep track of notes and such, why not just write the book in Word instead of writing it in Scrivener, compiling into Word, and spending a lot of time wrestling with formatting issues, which is what’s happening now? I think there’s something about Scrivener I’m fundamentally missing.
Scrivener’s main purpose is to help you with the actual writing process, in a non-linear fashion. You can write in small chunks, move things around, find things easily, change your structure, attach synopses to your text, organise work within an index card metaphor, add metadata to help you plan and manage your arguments/story, view changing combinations of documents as a if they were a unified whole, track progress status of individual sections of text, take snapshots of all or parts of your work, write in one font but output in another, output in multiple formats from a single text base, write in green text on a black screen like it was in the olden days…
Word is much more monolithically linear. In a former life as a technical author, I used to know various incarnations of Word inside out, and I was extremely comfortable in it; I still use a recent Windows version at the office, although that job doesn’t have heavy writing responsibilities. Despite that, Scrivener’s writing environment was so much more streamlined and versatile that I switched to it completely for my own writing within two days of downloading the trial five years ago. For me, there is no comparison in terms of the tools offered to the writer in terms of the writing/composition process; Scrivener helps me organise my thinking and writing, whereas Word is more layout-focused. I also find Scrivener to be infinitely more stable with large documents.
You can organise research in the same Scrivener project as your writing, and this is very sensible and usable for many writing scenarios. In fact, I use this approach for fiction-writing endeavours. However, if you have heavy research needs (as you probably do with a 100k-word non-fiction book, depending on your subject matter), then it makes more sense to use a dedicated program for managing that. Most of my research is for non-fiction or academic writing, and is not specific to any one writing project, so I use Bookends (to manage references, store details of sources etc) and DevonThink Pro (to store bits of information, documents etc). DevonThink Pro offers all sorts of advanced search techniques, some of which I have never got to grips with – but the functionality I do use means that I can always find everything I am looking for (and often things I had forgotten I had collected). Scrivener integrates well with both DevonThink Pro (use DTP’s “copy item link” feature to create a static link that you can use within Scrivener) and Bookends, and you will find several threads on this forum about related workflows.
If you have specific formatting issues when compiling to Word (or anywhere else, for that matter), do ask us in technical support and we’ll see what we can do to help.
Astrid
It’s hard to give a single answer because everyone’s workflow is a little different. You might want to browse the forums to get an idea of how other users incorporate Scrivener into their processes.
For my own work, I think of the process as something like a funnel, getting more and more specific as I work my way down.
So at the top level, I have a whole pile of information. Technical papers, books, interviews, web pages. That all goes into DevonThink Pro. I tend to deal with the same topics repeatedly, so DTP’s ability to maintain a large archive is invaluable.
As I read through the raw materials, I take notes. Sometimes these notes go on index cards – yes, the paper kind – lately they’ve been going into Tinderbox. They are really only relevant to the preparation of a single project, so I don’t need the long-term archiving that I do for raw materials.
(For the purposes of my work flow, these are just 1-3 sentence snippets capturing concepts I want to address. For longer excerpts, you might want to use different tools, or might want to stick with DTP for a little longer.)
Once I’ve reviewed the materials, it’s time to start building an outline. That involves shuffling the notes around, grouping similar concepts from different sources together, figuring out how to make the argument flow from one point to the next. I used to use mindmapping software for this, but realized I was spending too much time fussing with the aesthetics of the map. So I either use Tinderbox’s Map feature or make stacks of physical cards.
(You could do this in Scrivener if you wanted. Each notecard could then become a synopsis for the section it belongs to. Remember that there’s no reason why a Binder item needs to be long: it can be just a few sentences or paragraphs if you like. But IMO other tools might be better suited to the massive complexity of a long non-fiction book.)
Now that I have an outline, it’s time to wake up Scrivener. At a minimum, I’ll create a Binder item for each main topic in the outline, but often I’ll break the Binder structure into smaller chunks. I may or may not pull the whole Tinderbox structure in, really depending on how complex the project it is and how much time I have. If appropriate to the project, I’ll use Scrivener’s metadata to store and track things like target section lengths and intermediate deadlines.
(For book length projects, this is an iterative process. I’ll lay out the overall structure of the book early on, then address each of the chapters in more detail. Note that I often don’t write the chapters in linear order.)
I do all the writing and editing in Scrivener, right up to the point where I’m ready to send the finished product (or an intermediate draft) off to my editor. In my case, that’s usually at least three drafts, with the first two usually involving major structural changes. Moving entire pages around is vastly easier in Scrivener than in a traditional single-document word processor. So much so that Scrivener would be worthwhile even if that were all that it could do. (And indeed, this capability is why many of us adopted Scrivener in the first place, back in Mac version 1.0.) Depending on the project, often the Scrivener Compile output is all I need. If I need more complex formatting, or if there are lots of tables and figures, I’ll do those in Word.
If my editor has structural change requests, I’ll often pull the document back into Scrivener. At this point it’s a tradeoff between how painful it is to work in Word, and how hard it would be to transition to Scrivener and back. In some cases, I’ve even brought a single section back into Scrivener, knowing that I’ll need to copy and paste it back into the Word document when I’m done.
Again, this is just what works for me. Your mileage may vary. But I hope it shows how the various tools can work together.
Katherine
I was about to say that there have been many discussions of this sort of organisational problem, some of them quite recent, so a search of the forums will bring you to them. You might also take a look at this, if you haven’t already seen it:
stevenberlinjohnson.com/mova … 00230.html
I divide my academic writing into very small chunks: typically each paragraph in a separate “scrivening”. This makes it much easier to move things around as ideas develop, and makes sure the flow of ideas is correct. The subject of each paragraph appears as the name of the text document in the binder. You could do it all in Word, I’m sure, but I just wouldn’t want to nowadays. Scrivener makes the writing environment so much more flexible. And it doesn’t bombard you with insistent cues to format everything and tart up the layout when you should be concentrating on the words.
Martin.
The first thing I do in any installation of Word is turn off most of the autoformatting and “suggestion” features. That makes it almost bearable. But Scrivener is as big an improvement over Word as Word was over the likes of WordPerfect.
Katherine
Not long ago I was forced to try to do some work on a public computer in a recent version of Word, and I almost shot myself in the first five minutes. Never again. And I once wrote a 150,000 word book in Word 5 … I don’t know how.
Special thanks to kewms – understanding how people set up the workflow for a project like mine in practice is really enlightening. Maybe I should have asked “If you are writing a nonfiction popular-science book in the 100K word range, tell me about how you get from massive piles of research to finished, formatted text, using Scrivener + other tools.” But is that appropriate for “technical support”?