I love the corkboard and all of its features; having practically all of my book (or at least huge sections of it) in a single screen really helps me get a good idea of the storyline and where it might drag or where I can fit in new scenes.
That said, I think that it could be even more useful if the synopsis was more versatile. What I had in mind was this: you can make a number of “focus points” that show up in the Inspector. Selecting a focus point gives you different synopses for each scene. This allows you to track the pacing or development for different, well, focus points. For example, you start out with the standard synopsis like it is now. I use this to track my major plot points. If I could add a focus point, though, I’d have the exact same scenes and content etc. but I could have different synopses. For example, I could name the extra focus point “character B” and track the emotional arc (or appearances) for character B over each scene. I could add another focus point called “discoveries” and track what my main character finds out in each scene, to make sure I dole out information about the plot at a good pace. It would be really handy to have an overview of the different aspects of my book like this, instead of needing to stuff everything into a single index card or in the notes folder, both of which make it (practicall)y impossible to see everything on a single screen.
I’m sure non-fiction could find good use for this as well.
I hope I explained that well! I love Scrivener as is, but this would make it absolutely invaluable when it comes to editing.
Have you tried Scrivener Links (Cmd-L), which will place a note in your Research folder (by default)? You could then create folders with these notes organised to contain different types of focus-point, auto-create synopses and view them on a corkboard as you’re describing that you do with your existing synopses.
I would also recommend you take a look at inspector comments. This sounds like a “hand in glove” feature for what you want. Basically you can type out “synopsis sized” notes into a stack in the inspector, and tie those notes to a particular location within the document. When you load the document, all of these notes can be viewed in the inspector as a stack, and clicking on any of them will scroll you right to that spot in the document. Since they are just comments, they can be excluded from the compile and thus remain strictly an authoring tool.
Another nice feature is that these “stacks” of notes combine, when viewing multiple documents. In scrivenings mode, all of the collected notes that are available for the visible text will be placed into the inspector.
Another method to achieve something similar is to use color-coded keywords and color-coded highlighted document notes. By displaying the keyword chips on the cards in corkboard view, you can get an overview of the spacing for your focal points, and if you pull up the inspector as well you can click on any card and get a detailed description (like your synopsis feature) in the notes. Using highlights in the notes just makes this faster–if the blue keyword means “protagonist’s moral development” and then you use the same blue to highlight the notes you make on that point, it’s easy to spot the relevant note.
You won’t be able to see all your notes for a focus at once, the way you can with synopses on index cards, but since you can only actually read one at a time anyway this may not throw you as much as you’d think, and with the keyword chips now visible on the cards you can still get a good idea of the pacing.
(The color coding also works in conjunction with comments, of course, either highlighting text or coloring the whole comment background. I just find personally it’s an excellent visual cue that works splendidly through all of 2.0.)
My other thought on this, depending how much you really want to say on each focus “synopsis”, is to use the custom meta-data for this and then view your manuscript in outliner, rather than corkboard, to look through everything. (In theory I don’t think it would matter how much you wrote, provided you turned on the “wrap” feature for the meta-data, but presently I think there’s a bug in certain views that can cause Scrivener to go loopy if the text box drops over another row…Keith’s on it, so I’m not sure if this has been updated in the current download or not, but it should be soon. Anyway, just FYI in case you try this and get odd behavior, just close Scrivener and restart.) I’m using this for tracking the timeline of my current work and it’s a nice way to tuck in information that you don’t always need visible but want easily accessible.