Maybe this isn’t possible, or maybe I’m just doing something wrong, but I have my ongoing story, and then loads of research and notes. A couple of times, I’ve made changes that require that I find, say, a character’s name in every single location. This is difficult.
I can only use the Find function within a chapter and not the entire collection of chapters comprising my book. I also can’t Find through all of my research without drilling down and running smaller searches in folders.
I can’t believe that this is normal… Scrivener does so many things so well, that I’m convinced I’m just doing something wrong. Please tell me that I’m doing something wrong.
Suppose that I’m 75% of the way through my book and decided that a minor character’s name needs to be modified for some reason. I want to find every place they appear, plus find the many notes regarding them in my Research. Shouldn’t I be able to do something like: Find every single occurrence of the name “Joe Blow”?
Hello Saturn,
Keywords are probably your best bet. Make each of your characters name a keyword; this will enable you to find them anywhere and to alter their detail. Check out the extensive keyword uses in the manual. There is a post somewhere on the site detailing how a user manages to link keywords and locations to find out which characters are where, fascinating stuff.
Good luck with your writing.
Edit - here’s a link to the useful character post pigfender.com/index.php/2013 … -keywords/
You can use the Project search to call up all the documents containing the search term, then select them all in the search results collection and load them as a Scrivenings session in the editor. Then you can step through the individual instances via the standard Edit > Find > Find dialog. You could also just use Project Replace directly, but you want to be careful with that since it can’t be undone and it’s easy to accidentally substitute “Joe” for “Clay” and end up talking about “Joemores” and the “red Joe on the banks of the river”.