Hi, I have used Scrivener on and off for years to keep various project notebooks. I feel very lonesome, but surely I cannot be the only one who appreciates Scrivener’s ability to organise, support research, include or link to just about anything and calm the chaos of the mind.
I understand that Scrivener’s focus has always been to support writers, but along the way, it has become capable of supporting a much more expansive community.
If there were a way to draw us misfits, into the fold, I am sure we would not do anything to tarnish its reputation. We will be very respectful. Afterall, we all love a good book
Hi.
I can only speak for myself (my own perspective), but I am pretty sure that Literature and Latte supports writing, any type of writing, as long as it is not a DIY manual for a bomb.
My opinion is that if you use the software to write (any form – or just use Scrivener (or scapple) to organize whatever), there is room for you here.
Yeah, sure, I agree. But try googling for something like “Best Scrivner structure for bread baking” or “Scrivener project template for [fill in the blank]”, where blank can be anything you want to keep a detailed notebook on. NOTE I am not suggesting that the world should start creating thousands of project-specific templates. I am alluding to the fact that I have come up empty-handed whenever I have searched for anything outside the “writer’s” scope. I am not criticising anyone for this. I just wonder if there is not a remote community that has not found a way to coalesce.
I am not sure I understand…
A template is simply a project in its early stage. Whether at this point it is intended to become a novel or a cookbook, the sole difference is in the terms used to designate this or that.
I don’t quite agree. If that were strictly accurate, there would be only one universal template. To use your examples, a cookbook does not typically have characters, scenes, etc., that structure a novel. Whether a specific type of book–or project–deserves a specialised project template or page template is very subjective.
I mean, take a look at project templates for Journaling. They are a whole different kettle of fish.
I am not sure I follow.
But you can ask pretty much any question you may have here.
If you want something, or would like to know how to do it, just ask away.
If you want to connect with people using Scrivener the same way you do, create a thread where you describe what it is that you do, and invite people to share the details of their experience. (?)
The folks on the internet that do share templates are typically writers trying to attract you to their website with freebies.
The first place I’d search for Scrivener stuff would be these forums, not Google. For instance, if you’re interested, say, in cookbooks…
That said, my experience has been that most people don’t post their projects as templates to share with others. First, everybody’s busy. Second, every person’s working style is so different. In the end I’ve personally found it’s just easier to develop my own structure for my own purposes than to try to mold someone else’s idea to work for me. I’ll go out on a limb and say that many if not most folks who have been using Scrivener for a long time do the same.
All that said–if you want to start a thread and post templates from your various projects and ask others to share theirs, go for it! Be the change you want to see.
I might even share my bomb-making–I mean, brownie-making–template.
There actually is a universal Scrivener template: Blank. There is no functionality in the others that can’t be duplicated by modifying the Blank template. That’s where I almost always start.
So to create a “project notebook” template, you might start by thinking about what folders and template documents you would like to see. Create a “blank” project, add those items to it, refine as needed.
Absolutely agree with the others. I’ve been using Scrivener for 16½ years, and for all my projects, whatever their purpose, they’ve all started from Blank. The only difference being I created my own modified Blank template with the launch of Scrivener 3 to include my choice of editing font (though I’m now actually reverting to the default Palatino!), heading, blockquote and other basic styles, and a project compile format.
When I began collating all our recipes into a Scrivener project, I looked at the Recipe Collection template but immediately knew it wasn’t what would work for me, so binned it and started again from my Blank.
Scrivener is flexible so that each one of us can work our own way; that is it’s great strength.
Here are some further resources and discussions that might be helpful for using Scrivener in a more general purpose fashion:
Outlining vs Note Bin: overall, I wish I have more on the vast philosophical differences between traditional note-taking tools, like the ones you list, and large-scale outliners. This is one of those preferential things that may make or break a program for you. I would contend Scrivener can be used more like a traditional note-taker (with documents are the prevailing metaphor, and linking them together is essential), but it does feel a bit out of its element there, and for some people other tools may be a better fit. So here’s a bit on how Scrivener is designed to work, and how that is different from your typical everything-bucket-full-of-documents approach.
Some basic theory on outliner software for notetaking. Using the outliner metaphor for notetaking is crucial to understanding Scrivener’s approach. While it can be used as a “document bin”, it only really starts to shine when you give it more one-liners, so to speak. Anyone that has been drawn to tools like Roam, or Logseq, will be familiar with this idea.
Introduction to Scrivener’s outlining model. In case this whole topic is unfamiliar, and the only outlining you’ve ever done is with bullet lists in text editors, this post, the cross-links within it, and the follow-up post below it, are a good starting point.
Tips for organic outlining. In the same vein as above, this goes into a few different concepts and ways of making Scrivener’s outliner work with you for rapid note-taking and thought building. Note the list of links in a follow-up post—if you’re still a bit foggy on how this all could be of use, there is a lot more on this topic. Much of it is written toward the perspective of writing long-form texts (naturally), but as I’ll go into greater detail in one of the links below, there is a lot overlap in the tool chest we use to take notes, and write long-form, which is part of what makes Scrivener unique in this field.
Again, anyone who has used Roam or Loseq will get this, and will get how elegent and simple a nested outline can be for taking notes. But if that’s a new idea, I’d say try this: avoid Scrivener’s text editor for a bit. Force yourself to think entirely in its Outliner view. Learn how to make it shine, see how it can describe your ideas as you come up with them. Once you’ve got that, then start writing long-form into the outline headings you’ve created, maybe using the short synopses you jotted down, as a starting point for fleshing out these ideas. You might find you don’t need as much of the text editor as you thought! And you might, at this point, see how much of a philosophical gulf there is between document(note)-bucket style programs and outliners.
Practical techniques and methods: here are some discussions on Zettelkasten, and other more practical applications of note taking, such as a project template designed to focus the Scrivener project window on this task.
A template that creates a project designed to be used as a note-taking tool. The idea here was to take the “Scratch Pad” feature, and make it even better, as a dedicated project. This idea demonstrates how flexible the project window is, and how we can hone it to better suit a specific purpose, such as note-taking instead of bulk writing.
Using Scrivener as a Zettelkasten. You can skip past the first few paragraphs on how Scapple isn’t a good everything-bucket. After that, this covers some basics, with a focus on what in Scrivener works well with Zettelkasten method—but frankly the core ideas of that particular paper-based method are so simple, these techniques are universally useful. This includes a list of topics in the user manual to look at.
Tips for efficient transcription. While also starting from a conversation on Zettelkestan, this has more to do with getting a paper-based note taking system into Scrivener efficiently. Thus less theory, and more some tips on efficient project window navigation, when transcribing notes. I would say these tips are equally useful for any form of transcription, or taking down notes in a lecture for example. Don’t skip just because you don’t use ZK, I mean to say.
Creating a ticketing system for meta-note-taking. While this technique is a very specific method I developed to track large-scale editing in a book, the core concepts behind it are broadly applicable to any task where we might want to summarise or overview smaller pieces of information together into meta-lists. At least for how I curate my notes, the process of going back and collecting thoughts into lists-of-lists, and cross-referencing between them, is an invaluable part of the process of augmenting our memory with notes.
It’s how I got this list of links. I didn’t spend hours doing it all from scratch, I looked up my list-of-lists and found meta-lists going over years of thoughts on note-taking, linking, outlining and so forth. And now that I’ve combined these related topics together into this list, I now have another meta-list to find in the future.
Scrivener 3’s features for note-taking. Originally formulated as a response to a v1/v2 user who felt v3 wasn’t as good for note-taking, this post serves as list of tips and tricks, on the kinds of things we added to the software to make it better for that purpose—and some of our design thoughts on why we went in the directions we did, such as the concept that there should be as little friction as possible between you creating a new note and beginning to type your thoughts.
Integration:
Using external folder sync to connect software together. While much has been said on the either/or equation, with Scrivener you are not limited to only using Scrivener. This post covers the broad idea, and links to more specific instructions, on how to set up Scrivener to produce a folder of files that it will maintain a two-way sync with. Most tools that can work on a folder of files will automatically benefit from this capability and work with Scrivener seamlessly. Scrivener does some things nothing else can do, other programs do things it can’t do as well; why not have both?
Using integration for better Markdown writing. This one focuses more on Markdown-based writing. Scrivener is itself a powerful Markdown-based writing platform, but its text editor is a little lacking in what some might expect of that. This shows how you can use a more powerful text editor (like Sublime Text) with Scrivener’s outlining. If you think best, and jot down notes in Markdown (or any markup really), and find Scrivener’s bulky and complicated rich text editor approach a turn-off, this might save the rest of the software for you.
Linking:
Notes on using Scrivener like a wiki. This first post has some further links to follow; also scroll down for further discussion on the topic of “wiki-like” usage. This also contains some thoughts on the differences between tools like Zettlr or Obsidian, and Scrivener.
Connecting ideas together. This dips into a broader discussion on how to link things together. We typically think of linking as a hard piece of technology (usually clickable), and while Scrivener supports that concept fully, this goes into the many softer or fuzzier ways of associating things together, some of which are rare capabilities in the note-taking genre.
Linking text to text directly. While certainly not a task specific to note-taking vs general writing, it’s the kind of thing I tend to do a lot of in projects that are primarily meant for notes, so you might find some of this to be useful.
On bi-directional linking. Written primarily for those familiar with dedicated note-taking tools, such as Obsidian and Logseq, this is meant to demonstrate how Scrivener works differently from them, and where it has pros where some other tools have cons.
I don’t know if you will find an actual community of Scrivener users using Scrivener less in a writing role and more in a note-taking role. Instead you’ll find a lot of discussion scattered throughout existing communities. It is a minority usage, but one that has always had a lot of interest—to the point that a lot of v3’s design improvements were made with that kind of usage in mind. It just so happens that a lot of what makes for a good note-taking tool also makes for a good writing tool, so even those things tend to be more largely talked of in the context of long-form writing.
But as you’ll see, I’m a big fan of using it that way, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the large majority of my Scrivener projects have nothing to do with long-form writing!
Hi Amber, thank you for taking the time to reply with this wealth of useful information. Very helpful and informative. Your pointer to “Linking text to text directly” is fascinating. I have only read the start so far, but it appears to be something that could/should be in the manual
Actually, everything essential has already been said.
What some of the people here are skeptical about and rarely mention is that one Scrivener project is enough for everything. If you want that. Like I do.
I have exactly one Scrivener file, for everything. Images, graphics, PDF, text everything you can imagine. It’s my all-in-one database. Sometimes I even write something with Scrivener The file is 1.5 GB in size. And I have never had a problem with it.
Scrivener handles large files well. Here and there the app might get a little slower. But it’s a matter of fractions of seconds, not worth mentioning.
Maybe others have different experiences. These are mine.
i often get ideas at random moments when i am reading or thinking about something and i need a way to capture them immediately without interrupting my flow. scrivener has many features for organizing text but sometimes it feels slower than i want when i just need to jot something down quickly. i am trying to find a way to make scrivener feel as fast and flexible as a simple online notepad so i can capture thoughts right away and still have them accessible later.
i was inspired by online notepads because they allow users to record ideas instantly online in a minimal distraction free way. the idea of opening a blank space and immediately writing anything that comes to mind is very appealing. online notepads remove all barriers between thinking and writing letting the user focus purely on capturing thoughts. i want to bring some of that speed and simplicity into scrivener so i can write ideas freely without worrying about structure at the moment and then organize them afterward without breaking my flow.
sometimes i think in short bursts and just want to jot fragments of dialogue quick observations or research points immediately. in scrivener creating a new document or organizing notes can slow me down and i am looking for a way to avoid that. i am curious if there is a method or workflow that lets me enter ideas instantly and have them remain accessible in the binder or collections without extra effort.
i also want to make sure that when i go back to review these notes i can find everything quickly. the challenge for me is capturing ideas without losing them while keeping them organized enough to be useful later. i am imagining a system where i can drop ideas in a simple space as soon as they occur and then easily categorize tag or move them later when i have time to think about structure.
i am curious about whether features like quick reference panels scratchpads or temporary documents can be used to create this instant capture workflow. i want to capture ideas immediately retrieve them fast and integrate them into larger projects without feeling like i have to choose a location or format right away. i am interested in hearing how other users handle fast note taking in scrivener without losing the spontaneity of thought.
i want to know how to make scrivener function more like an online notepad that allows me to write anything at the moment it occurs while keeping all notes organized and easy to access. i am asking because i want a method that allows me to record my thoughts quickly maintain flexibility and keep everything safe and structured for future use all inside scrivener without breaking my creative flow
I’ve merged your post with an existing thread that covers pretty much the same exact query—which is itself one of many other posts on this topic. I’m not sure we need yet another covering the same ground. I would refer you to my round-up up discussions in this post, above.
In particular I would recommend the link to the notepad template in the second list, under “Practical techniques and methods”, which provides one with a kind of super-scratch pad—a project with a layout dedicated to rapid note taking. But really, it sounds like you’d benefit from reading a number of these threads that this links to, as using that template efficiently is something that may not be immediately obvious if you are new to the software. For example, a lot of people don’t know you can just press Enter in the outline list to make a new note, and that there is no great need to name it. Just write.
I’ll admit to being somewhat outside of your preferential zone, though. When I think of efficient and effective notetaking I do not in any way think of “online notepads”, whatever that means. Having to open a massive, bloated, memory hogging web browser and then putting up with what amounts to a document that has been supercharged with macros to emulate “software” is not my idea of any of that. Give me a plain old text editor like Vim and some Markdown files, before that.
So we might have some differences of opinion, but I do think you can make Scrivener a lot more efficient than you might have been doing with it, in the past. The “Scrivener 3’s features for note-taking” link is a pretty good overview of the kind of thinking we put into the design, for rapid and efficient note-taking, written as a defence of it. But really, dig into whatever strikes your fancy. I wasn’t entirely joking about Vim and Markdown files. With Scrivener’s external sync folder feature, which can be made to operate as a file system inbox, you get the best of both worlds.
The file is 1.5 GB in size. And I have never had a problem with it.
