Unified library

Hi fellow Scriveners,

I like the (Ulysses / Evernote) idea of a unified library, but as writing tools, they’re both inadequate. I’m thinking about creating a structure to hold all my novels and short storys. But Scrivener is one story at a time (metadata etc), so: Has anyone tried this? Pros / cons?

Do you mean putting all your writing into a single Scrivener project? Scrivener is not necessarily one story per project. Somewhere on this website there’s discussion of putting a novel series into one project. But a good reason that I have never put all my writing into one project is that, after a while as the project gets bigger, the time taken by Scrivener to back up the project will start to lengthen.

Instead, I have simply created a single folder in the Finder to contain my multiple projects.

I use Scrivener for almost all my writing: books, scientific articles, applications for funding, short articles, long articles, etc. Like Hugh I have it all in a dedicated folder in Finder. I think I have something like 120 projects so far. Being forced to have it all in one unified library within the software itself was one of the reasons I early on did not get Ulysses. I use Storyist, which has a unified library, for a small, specialized blog project but have still not understood how to organize in a smart way, so I will probably skip Storyist in the future.

Why not use Evernote or Story Tracker just to keep track of all your writing if Finder isn’t enough?

I would put everything in one file. I like the idea of opening Scrivener and there it is.

  • Writing

    • Drafts
    • Finished
    • Published
      • Reviews
    • Ideas
  • Notes

Something like that, and each story would have it’s own subfolder. It would include images, so the file will be big.

Evernote is ‘expensive’ and Ulysses just isn’t there yet. But I like it’s unified feature, autosync and backup.

All in one project was recently discussed in this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=39613

Seems doable, but you may need to think about only triggering backup manually and not zipping. As Scrivener is sub-document based it will scale very well to very large projects (even if you have many images, unless they are all in one document or you use scrivenings mode on a large number of image-containing sub-docs)… But personally I don’t use this way of organising (I like separate projects, I also collaborate as a scientist so need to split things into discrete chunks)…

Oh! Thanks :slight_smile:

I have a decent folder-hierarchy locally / Dropbox, but my brain is sometimes all over the place, and I have to open this and then that, and it would just be nice to have it all in the same place.

(sentimental ramblings.)
I was looking for a old Halloween-themed horror story this morning, and just figured how great it would be have it all lined up. I’d forgotten about a lot of my old stories … in fx Microsoft Works for DOS (and Word (I really, really, hate that program!), OpenOffice and a bunch of Linux writing programs as well as OS/2 and OSX, but as text/RTF/Markdown. It would be fantastic to have them all converted and looked at :slight_smile:

Look up how to search your computer for all scrivener projects (files ending in .scriv) with the Finder, and how to save that search in the sidebar.

That’s how I keep track of all the Scrivener projects that I have squirreled away. It updates the search results every time I click on that item in the side bar.