Scrivener Tutor available to meet? 1st time author ready to edit 1st draft and overwhelmed with tool

Scrivener Newcomer Central
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Would someone kindly point me to resources? I have my first draft written and want to clean up the formatting, print a draft, and begin the first edit. However, after trying to format, clean up, and compile, I feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the tool and the prolific tutorials. My compilations look frightening.

I think I need a tool expert who can meet with me to give me guidance and answer my questions real-time so that I can get a handle on this book and move forward. Suggestions? Thank you.

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Hi @cristine, if you want to get together with someone to help you, a start would be to give us some idea of where you are. There are lots of people on th forum who are happy to help, but they’re spread all round the globe.

I for one am in the southwest of the UK.

:slight_smile:
Mark

PS also let us know if you’re Mac or Windows based.

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Thanks, Mark, for your reply. I am in New York City; a virtual meeting or in-person are of equal interest. I am using Windows.

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Good luck then Cristine. I’m not in the running, but I hope there’s someone in New York who’ll respond.

:slight_smile:
Mark

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thanks very much, Mark

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If you’re connected with a writer’s group in NYC there are probably some experienced Scrivener users there.

In what way are compilations frightening? You don’t have the formatting you want, or not all of the material you want is appearing?

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thanks, that is a good suggestion. I have just moved back to the area, and now I have a new incentive to connect with a writer’s group.

The compilation looks frightening because the formatting is a giant mess. There are numerous long horizontal lines and section breaks throughout that I can’t figure out how to remove, for instance. My book also contains numerous worksheets with blank horizontal lines for readers to be encouraged to do the work (self-help genre) and these are not looking appealing and I do not understand how to improve them. I plan to print out the manuscript once I have done a few rounds of edits.

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Are the long horizontal lines in the Scrivener editor, or the output document? That is, are you actually seeing the separators between documents in Scrivenings view?

You can use the Documents → Merge command to glue documents together if you don’t want a break between them. Personally, I tend to ignore section breaks at the first draft stage because I know they’re going to change.

Blank horizontal lines are kind of inherently uninteresting. Making the workbook sections look “good” may end up being the sort of design task that is best tackled outside of Scrivener. Again, this isn’t something I would worry about at the first draft stage.

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ok, thank you very much. Putting my inner (recovering) perfectionist down for nap while I revise.

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