Using the binder to track key concepts instead of keywords

Scrivener
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Oh, thank you so much! I’m also relieved to know I didn’t delete any keywords from documents. Or at least I’m assuming so. Though sometimes in the keyword interface things are a bit strange. For instance, once I decided to experiment with turning all the keywords into files instead, I developed a plan to move them to the binder. First, I needed to expand them all at once, but the buttons that let you do that with the binder don’t work on keywords? At least I couldn’t make them. So I manually expanded them, and tried to select all with control-A, which it did. But when I dragged them to a document, I thought they only showed some of them? Though I’m trying again, and I think what is happening is that I have them sorted alphabetically in the interface with a very careful naming system. I think when they get pulled the file, they resort to the non-sorted order? I think that’s where I got confused. That seems to be what happens when I try again. I had hoped they’d be in the correct order and then I was going to go through and do the “split document with selection as title” command about a thousand times. I still have, but I’ve also done sections where I just drag one keyword to a new file at a time. And I love that the tool bar is customizable, so I could put the “new” button right over my keyword interface, and it was going quite quickly. (This makes the keyword the title of the new file, but it’s a lighter gray color. So then I spent ages trying to figure out if there was a way to make it the darker color without having to copy and paste each keyword to the title of its document, but I guess not?) And then I went through and re-nested them into their hierarchies.

But knowing that I can error proof the keyword list is making me rethink my decision to move them all the binder.

I think I am trying to use the keyword system for more than it’s designed for. But I’ve been very enraptured with them. I moved this story into the PC version of scrivener. I had had files with all my notes previously, but the ios version doesn’t have all the metadata and outlines. First I experimented with metadata , with fields for characters and locations and things like that. Which is great and I love it. But I always have this nagging feeling that I’m not using it in a way that relates things to each other as much as they could be. Keywords seem a bit more connected, in that you use the same keyword, say for a character, on multiple sections. Though in the end, you can’t click on that keyword and go to any sort of central place with all the documents… you have to do the search. And I suppose I could do the search in metadata as easily as I can in keywords? I like keywords because once you have one, it’s there and won’t be confused by typing things like “mom” in one place and “his mother” in another place, or what have you. I use the one keyword and know what it is and apply it consistently.

Sorry for rambling. I’ve just been applying keywords as I read through the sections of this story. I reduced them all to smaller sections, five hundred words or so, and apply the appropriate keywords. And I made this hierarchy with title, so a keyword might be something like “Chars: Monsters, the purple one” or something, so I can look at it in a document and see the whole hierarchy it belongs to. As I’ve done this, I keep adding more things to take note of and now I have this crazy outline and I look at it and it seems like a concise summary of the whole monstrous thing. And I start seeing patterns and disparate parts of the story start getting connected together.

Sorry, I’m just excited and having fun playing around with it.

Thanks again for your help!

katie

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You can indeed search by other kinds of metadata. If you click on the magnifying glass to the left of where you type in your search, you’ll see a list of places to search within at the top. When you run a keyword search from the keyword panel, it sets that option to only search within Keywords.

So that in and of itself is an advantage to using Keywords as a type of metadata for anything you will be running a lot of searches on. While you can search for other metadata, it takes multiple clicks and you have to type the whole thing in.

As for using the binder as a kind of surrogate metadata, that is certainly a viable approach, but you will want to look into the Document Bookmarks feature for how to make that idea useful. The idea would be to open the inspector to the Bookmarks tab (make sure it is set to Document Bookmarks at the top, clicking where it says “Project Bookmarks”), and then drag and drop the “keyword” from the binder into that list. You could keep notes on each keyword in the text area below. What makes this shine is that if you visit the keyword you dropped in the main editor, so that you’re inspecting it, you’ll find the section you linked from is listed in its Bookmark list.

In essence it replicates a search result in the sense that you have a list of things using this “keyword” item, without having to search though. And since it is symmetrical, you can make assignments from the keyword list too. Dropping a scene into its Bookmark list automatically inserts the keyword item into its bookmark list.

So that’s a pretty nice way of going about things, though I myself would stick with using Keywords for that kind of stuff; the feature itself is too useful for me to dispense with it entirely. But this notion described above is a useful approach to think about for other things too. For example the purple monster thing might have a write-up somewhere in the binder, and linking to it from scenes that involve it can give you not only access to its description in the sidebar, but again those back-links showing all the scenes you associated with it. That works equally well for referencing closely related scenes to each other, and so on.

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That all sounds fascinating to experiment with. Thank you!

I’ve looked at the bookmarks thing a tiny bit, but certainly not in the way you’ve mentioned. I’m excited to go try.

PS I love this forum, because every time I think I can’t do something in scrivener and I’ve exhausted all my searching-for-info capabilities, I ask a question here, and I get useful answers I never would have expected. So thanks!

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Hello again! I think I’m slowly getting it. I did notice that if I open the project bookmarks floating window and hover over the little arrow in the box in the bottom right-hand corner, it says it will open in the quick “refernce” folder. Though perhaps that’s on purpose for limited character count or something? Okay, back to work! Thx!

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Ah, no a Quick Reference window is any binder document that you’ve opened up in a window. For example, select something in the binder and hit the Spacebar.

Now that you’re there, in the lower left corner you’ll find a bookmark icon. Click that, and you’ve basically come back around to the point you spotted. It’s two different ways to this same combination of features: project bookmarks in a sidebar, and a quick editor on the right.

But to be clear those are different from the document bookmarks I referred to above. Those are only available in the inspector. Project bookmarks are available from everywhere, and would be of no use for tracking back-links.

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