Memoir Organizing in Scrivener

Scrivener
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What template do folks recommend for organizing and writing a memoir in Scrivener?

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“Blank” is great. (Probably a minority opinion).

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Couldn’t agree more. My advice, for what it’s worth:

  • If you’re a “pantser”, start from Blank, start writing and develop the structure as you go.
  • If you’re a “plotter” who likes everything worked out before you start writing, start from Blank and develop the structure you want using the binder (and corkboard?) first then get on with Writing.
  • Don’t get fazed by the apparent complexity of Scrivener; don’t get bogged down trying to understand everything Scrivener can do before you start writing. You can start learning about different features as you come to need them.
  • Keep chunks small in individual Binder documents.
  • As you’re a Mac user, Scrivenings mode works really well.

:slight_smile:
Mark

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A template in Scrivener is just a starter project. You can do anything in “Blank” that you can with any of the other templates. Experienced users tend to either use “Blank” or develop a custom template that fits their own requirements.

If you haven’t already, I’d recommend taking a look at our Interactive Tutorial, available from the Help menu. It’s a good overview of Scrivener’s fundamental operations and might help you decide how to configure your project. You might also want to look at the section on Project Templates in the manual, which discusses what they do (and don’t do).

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Thanks for the ideas so far. I should have started by saying I have been using Scrivener for about 10 years, and have a few binders full of writing, but all of the bits and pieces are overwhelming. I’d like to organize better by pulling out pieces that fit the particular memoir I am focusing on. I have been using the non-fiction template, but it is not quite geared toward memoir, so was hoping for a better way of organizing. I have an older macbook pro (mid2012) and Scrivener 2.8. Scrivenings is not in this version, but I am not sure if my computer will support a newer version of Scrivener.

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It should. Your computer can handle macOS 10.15 (Catalina), and that’s more than enough for Scrivener (which requires 10.13 or newer). If you have 10.13+, you could just give the 3.x trial a shot.

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Scrivenings mode most definitely exists in Scrivener 2.8.

(Although I would recommend updating to Scrivener 2.9. Older versions may attempt to contact a license provider that no longer exists.)

My advice would be to decide what that actually means. Are you focusing on a particular theme? A particular time period? Interactions with a particular person? Create a new project and drag existing material relevant to the theme into it. (This is a copy operation, not a move operation, so the existing projects will not be changed.)

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