Is there such a thing as a template for a collection of short stories?
Not precisely, but the Novel template would work as a good starting point; one “chapter” folder for each story if you use multiple scenes in any of them, otherwise dispense with the folders and use “level 1” documents. You’ll have to change the compile settings to not automatically add “CHAPTER ONE” to each short story.
Ah, thanks. That’s a pity. The Novel template automatically calls the chapters ‘Chapter One’, ‘Chapter Two’, etc on compile, which obviously isn’t what you want in a short story collection. I solved this for myself by making a blank page with the title of each story in front of the particular story, using the Blank template; would be good, though, if there were Mac & PC templates for story collections.
It’s easy enough to amend the Novel template to take out the chapter prefixes as Robert suggests. The basic steps are:
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Don’t have the names of your story in the text. Use the Binder Titles instead.
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In the Compile dialog, make sure you’ve got All Options selected.
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Select Formatting and tick the Title and Text boxes for the Level 1+ Document line. (This assumes all your stories are single documents below the top level folder in the Binder.)
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Highlight the document line. You should see a dummy title and text in the box below: e.g. Chapter One Title. Click in it, then click the Section Layout button. Select the Title Prefix and Suffix tab, then remove any text from the Prefix box. Press OK. The dummy text will have changed accordingly.
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Compile your document. Your compilation should now just have the title of each story.
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Once you’re happy with the settings (I imagine you’ll want to make other changes as well…), then File > Save as Template to create your own suitably named Short Story template for the future.
That’s the basic approach: of course there are lots of options on the way, but I hope it gives you something to work on.
Regards
David
Thanks, David, this is great. One question: what are Binder Titles? Oh, wait, do you mean just title each document in the project’s binder with the name of the story it contains?
No, two; do you think Sex on a Plate would be a good title for a collection? posting.php?mode=edit&f=2&p=138945#
(Damn, dragging smilies in isn’t working!)
Actually, someone did post about such a template:
You could try a PM to see if they can share.
Martin.
(The titles of the separate documents in the Binder pane on the left?)
What am I compiling as?
I don’t understand “single documents below the top level folder”. Oh, do you mean you have the Draft folder, and then single stories whose documents are titled Love, Hate, Fear, Revenge, and so on?
I don’t understand “highlight the document line”. What does this mean? (Sorry to be dense; I looked around in the Compile dialogue and couldn’t see anything called ‘document’. It may be staring straight at me.)
Just save the actual project as a template?
(By the way, thanks, Martin; s/he doesn’t seem to have uploaded the template, so maybe isn’t here any more?)
No problem…
Yes, that’s it.
There are two relevant drop down boxes.
‘Format As’ will probably have defaulted to whatever the Novel Template says, but you could change it. I would have though the Paperback Novel one would be closest to producing something that’s like a published book – unless you want a submission manuscript, when you’d probably use ‘Standard Manuscript Format’. These are all just sets of default options aimed at particular formats. You can alter them as much as you like before you compile: after your changes will be retained as a ‘Custom’ preset next time you compile. You can save your new Format set using the Manage… item on the drop down menu.
‘Compile For’ sets the format of the produced document (e.g. will it be a PDF, a Word document, an ebook etc), so it depends what you want to use it for.
So, for example you select All Options, select ‘Paperback Novel’ as set of default Format As options, make any changes to the defaults (e.g. stripping out prefixes from titles), then ‘Compile As’ to a Word Document.
You need to select ‘Formatting’ in the left hand list first (under Compilation Options). That will give you a summary of your project’s hierarchy under Section Type, broken down into ‘Folders’, ‘Document Groups’, and ‘Documents’. These are not explicitly named but the icons are self-explanatory.
Each section type potentially has several levels, because you may have nested documents within document groups and / or within folders in your Binder. (e.g. if you have subsections within sections within chapters within parts) and you can set the format individually for each level of each type. So, depending on the complexity of your project structure, you may see more than one level for each section type.
For your purposes you’re most likely to have a simple structure. All you need to do is click on the Document line . You should see if it’s the right one because the dummy text will show the unwanted Chapter prefix. Then click on the Section Layout button and follow the instructions as in my first post.
Essentially, yes – but this means that all your text will repeat every time you start a new project based on the template.
So you’d probably want to get the compilation sets working exactly how you want them in the current project, then duplicate it in finder. Open the duplicate, delete all your text then save that as a new project template instead.
I appreciate there’s a lot in the above if you’re not used to it, but once you’ve played around with the process a couple of times it does get clearer: it’s actually very logically designed. The complexity comes because it’s so flexible.
A tip, in case you’ve not come across this. If you’re going to be compiling a lot to test things out, choose ‘Print’ as the Compile As option, then in the Print dialog choose the PDF drop down box and Open PDF in Preview… That way you don’t have to keep naming a document, which saves time when you’re testing. Of course, when you’re ready to compile properly, you’d choose Word Document or whatever.
HTH
David
Thanks very much, David, that’s very clear - I’ll try that.
Right, that seems to work well, except for one thing - it has my name and address in the resulting printout. How can I take these out?
By the way, will this be Mac-only, or can I pass it to PC-using friends?
Where’s the name and address appearing – on a title page at the front?
If so, there’s probably a document in the Binder somewhere with the information on (in some templates it’s under Front Matter). You can just delete this (or drag it to the Research folder where it won’t get compiled.
If not there are other places we can try…
I’m not sure about the position with templates being cross-platform to be honest. Some features are Mac only and I don’t really know enough detail to advise. You could always try it and see – it’s not going to break anything if you do.
On the mac version, there are placeholder tags that you can put in for the user’s name, address, and other contact information. This info is then gathered by scrivener from their “Me” Contacts entry. I believe the entire list of such tags is found under the Help menu.
Thanks, that seems to have worked, though I’m not sure, because it puts my name on the top of each page -
Maelduin/Short story template
so I’m not certain that it will take this information correctly from the user’s address book.
(I’m a little nervous of passing it to someone with a PC to use; the person I was going to pass it to has just bought Scrivener, and I don’t want to put him off it!)
Could one of you possibly take a look at it for me to see whether it takes your information correctly?
(Later: actually, it does, so that’s ok; however, if you’d look at it before I post it up for everyone to use, you might be able to suggest improvements.)
If your name is coming out in the Header, look at the Header / Footer section of the Compilation dialog > All Options. You should see that a tag such as <$author> or similar is in the Header field. Just delete it.
I’m not on my Scrivener computer at the moment, so can’t give the exact instructions, but I think it’s probably fairly self-explanatory once you’re in the Header/Footer section (select it on the left hand side of the All Options tab).
I don’t think that the Windows version can do this yet. I don’t know where the author information would come from, since there’s no address book that automatically comes with every windows computer, unlike in the Mac world, where there’s one maintained by Apple.
So they’ll see the unexpanded placeholder tags if it doesn’t have that ability.
If you’re nervous about leaving your personal info in place by accident, you could start from scratch again, but this time, hold down the Option key when you double-click the template of your choosing from Scrivener, it will leave the placeholders untouched.
Oh, thanks, nice tip!
For now, I’m going to post up the template, posting in Zen of Scrivener to say it’s up; I hope it’ll work well for people.
By the way, what does “stripping out prefixes from titles” mean?
…Never mind; uploaded it here literatureandlatte.com/forum/vie … 26#p139026
Just my way of describing what we did when we removed Chapter One etc earlier on in the thread…
Thanks for uploading the template, I’ll have a look at it later when I can.
Cheers
Brilliant - thank you so much for all your help.