Poetry: I have years of verse work to import, multiple drafts of each poem. I’ve just arrived, not sure how to organize the import: chapters as poems, with drafts as separate docs, or sub-folders, or…? Any suggestions? Also my poems are sometimes titled, most often merely dated & untitled. So far, my brain hurts thinking about this grand move to Scrivener. All advice welcome please and thank you.
sorry can’t help you at all, but I also am new to forums, so did want to say hello, and perhaps learn something by following your post
-Cally
Some general thoughts:
Scrivener’s Binder is infinitely malleable, as are the objects you create in it. Most importantly, there is no fixed structure in the Binder beyond Drafts, Research, and Trash. That’s all there is.
I would suggest starting with a new Project using the Blank template – which only has one Untitled Document in Drafts – and experiment with Importing, creating new Documents and Folders, and with Snapshots, which many folk use to store and compare their edits.
A few notes:
A Document can be converted into a Folder (and back again), and Documents can contain Documents (sub-Documents in a hierarchy). Folders can also contain text. What this all means is that Documents and Folders are essentially identical, it’s just the way they are displayed that varies, which depends on your choices and actions.
One of the challenges, I think, some folk have when first using Scrivener is that they fear they might somehow “go wrong” and not be able to reverse their “mistake”. That’s not to say that you can’t delete something that is unrecoverable in a Project – that’s a handy feature to have – but it’s not something you can do accidentally.
I’d also advise ignoring the Compile feature for a while. It’s a complex feature (unless you use the defaults), and it does require understanding all of the fundamentals I’ve mentioned above, so it will probably seem to be incomprehensible for a new user.
So, go in and play. Enjoy.
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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 among other things will introduce you to the terminology and make it easier to ask more detailed questions.
As @auxbuss said, there’s really no “right” answer. It’s your poetry, no one but you knows how it should be organized.
If it were me, I’d probably group versions of each individual poem together, and then group the poems themselves by “themes,” however you choose to define that.
If you have a specific finished product in mind, such as a chapbook, you might go a step further and either make a folder or use a keyword for poems that you are considering for inclusion. Whether to include all versions of a potential poem would be up to you: it’s easy enough to exclude unwanted versions when you assemble the output.
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Can’t make a mistake is a great way to approach this, knowing everything is malleable, unless time weighs heavily…and indeed I will, for the time being, take your handy advice and ignore the compile feature. It seems snapshots are an ideal way to treat draft versions to facilitate comparisons. I thank you very much. I’m looking forward to my adventure.
Thanks for your tips. I have completed the interactive tutorial - will likely revisit it too. I’ve also seen a couple of YouTube videos that are enlightening. But I do like the idea of employing the snapshot feature for different versions of the same poem, then with my body of work either grouping as you suggest, into various clusters, or keep defined for any future clustering perhaps via keywords, as you’ve mentioned. Your feedback has been helpful, and is appreciated.