Using the strong point of Scrivener: organizing the scenes or passages chronology. What's your process?

[LoneDraft]

One more question and I’ll be all set for a lightening fast progress in my project! This is really if you have some spare time to share your process in case you have the same issue.

At the moment, my manuscript documents keep increasing in numbers (they will probably merge later when it’s more stable, to simplify the tree view). I guess the sweet spot is below 100. I’m at 123 and I think it will top at 140-150 before the merge phase. That’s not easy to manage, and it would be a nightmare anywhere else but Scrivener.

So, now I need to figure out how I can sort all my fragments that are not yet anywhere in the main ‘timeline’. I mean I have my manuscript with 3/4 of the draft well organized, one folder for each big part of the novel, and subfolders for the biggest. And I have a couple of folders with the remaining non-sorted 1/4 of the draft.

My task is to shoehorn those fragments (scenes, bit of dialogues, etc) in the main tree of the manuscript.

My current process:

• Each fragment has a synopsis with the key points
• I add in the synopsis an additional line like: “// post event xx, pre event xx” which is the chronological and/or consistency constraint I keep an eye on. Sometime it’s fuzzy, not just a simple “event xx”, or it can be “circa xx”.
• And… well , I somehow slide the fragment in the main tree, in a temporary location, but outside the folders (they stay at top level below manuscript), so that I doesn’t look like I already figured where it should land.

Edit: for some very loose fragments (that could be almost anywhere in half the story) I think I need to focus on the mood, voice, and what it can show about the character’s arc, which is also a form of chronology but more fuzzy.

The point is that they are often unfinished bits of dialogue without much else (not even a place). And so I have a lot of freedom to place those, too much actually.
Hopefully this process will settle down by itself (crystallization?) as I cram in even more fragments, realizing that the timeline is askew or that I have a 8-day week, or whatever, and I’ll be able to address all that and finish the manuscript skeleton.

I’m all ears if you have any suggestion here about this task!

I’ll quotes relevant answers I already got from my statistics post, but the focus this time is on the chronologic organization:

@auxbuss

For fiction, one scene per document. I generally start splitting a scene into sub-docs once it goes above 3,000 words.

I group scenes together, usually by character arc, and arrange those groupings into some sort of temporal order, if possible.

I don’t use chapters till I’m done. I think of chapters as a courtesy to the reader. I first arrange the finished scenes in the order I want them, and then split them into chapters, adding any necessary glue.

This is reassuring, I’m almost on the same boat, only trying to make sure I can have a proper chronology without any flaw later (I had some).

@kewms

Moving text via the Binder is slightly safer than copying and pasting, because the text isn’t in clipboard limbo at any point, and because there’s no risk of mis-pasting into the wrong location. So if you’re still at a stage where you’re moving large chunks around, there are advantages to a Split/Move/Merge workflow.

@kewms

Scrivener’s ability to split things up is one of my most-loved features. In the early stages, most chunks are 1000 words or less, because that’s about how much I write in a single session. As the structure emerges, I’ll merge things down, eventually ending up with one document per scene.

@SCN

In my novel series, I structure it like this:

Novel > Chapter > Scene > Passage

This gives me all the granularity I need. Indeed, I rarely go to the passage level. When I do, it’s because I am uncertain if the passage would work better elsewhere. I usually make that decision in the revision stage.

@Vincent_Vincent

I work with my chapters in small subdivisions as I am in the creation process.
This makes it easier to swing things around, and makes it less overwhelming as you can then use the binder as an outliner and have the titles reflect what happens in this or that scene/document. (I never quite use the synopsis panel.)

But, the closer I get to completion, the more I merge my documents into complete chapters.

[GoalieDad]

I tend to write a scene as a unit/ministory. If you have fragments tied to partially finished scenes, then keep these in one folder (scraps, incompletes whatever) and then use document bookmarks to tie them to the scene you envision using them in. As a bookmark you will see text below in the inspector, or can float the fragment as a Qrp and import relevant information into the complete or incomplete scene and take snapshots as you integrate this information in. I like to add comments to direct my ideas if something is missing. So if walk away from scene and work elsewhere, have my thoughts on what to do to improve scene to refer too.

[AmberV]

@LoneDraft

At the moment, my manuscript documents keep increasing in numbers (they will probably merge later when it’s more stable, to simplify the tree view). I guess the sweet spot is below 100. I’m at 123 and I think it will top at 140-150 before the merge phase. That’s not easy to manage, and it would be a nightmare anywhere else but Scrivener.

What that point will be is bound to be pretty personal I think. I will say from my own experience, Scrivener does not at all struggle with more than that, like ten times more than that. I have some draft folders that are thousands of items long, and that’s not counting everything outside of the draft. In fact you can see one such binder by downloading the project used to compile the user manual. The source material in that is a bit out of date, but the essence of it is still the same.

You definitely do have to adopt a different approach to how you navigate in binders like that. I obviously never have the entire binder expanded. I use it much more like a 3-pane program where the binder is only used to select from top level groups, which load into the middle split as an Outliner. What I click on in the middle split automatically loads in the right split as text. And I would say very often the right split is using Scrivenings and showing many items at once. As you can guess from having such a detailed outline, most of the actual chunks of text are quite short and all by themselves would be isolated from the content around them. They are meant to be viewed as a whole.

I also use Quick Search a lot to load text into that right split, essentially skipping over the binder and outliner entirely.

Whether to merge also depends on your process. For me if I have two sections separated, it’s for a good reason. I want to be able to link to one of the directly, for example, or have metadata or snapshots for just it. Merging them would collapse all of that detail and ultimately make it harder to work with.

But for what your describing, where it is maybe even bits of dialogue, I could see merging being beneficial for that once it settles down.

What is nice about Scrivener is that there is nothing pushing you toward a certain way of working. If one chapter needs 20 sections in it and other needs only one, that’s fine. You can gradually work toward whatever is best for the material, and that is often going to change depending upon how far into the process you’ve gone.

[auxbuss]

First off: everyone’s process is different. Hanging round here for a few years makes that pretty obvious. What is absolutely essential for one person would be a nightmare for someone else.

For example, I have absolutely no idea why anyone would go anywhere near chapters till the manuscript is ready for publishing. For me, this is such a huge constraint – imposing publishing structure on a draft – that when I fixated on it on while writing my first novel, I almost gave up in despair. Luckily, a word from an established author put me straight.

Note: I now realise this is likely due to the type of story I write.

Being mathematically trained, I can now write:

Corollary: This is your journey, and only you, brave and galant traveller, can tame the maze and its monsters.

Observations:

• I have no idea how many documents I have in any Scrivener project. I have no idea why I should care. I don’t understand why it’s important to you. So I cannot help with that.
• The only structure I care about – at this stage – is the one that helps me develop and edit my story – editing is a whole other ballgame, but worry about that later.
• I don’t write synopses. I know what my scenes are doing. And if I need a reminder, then I reread it.
• I do keep notes in my text using Scrivener’s annotations. I mark them with known text, such as “TODO:”, and create a Collection for them. (I also use BetterTouchTool so that I can open and close these collections with a single keystroke, but that’s kind of an advanced thing.)
• Your current process sounds very messy and I encourage that. Scrivener lets you be as messy as you like. It’s your job as a writer to tidy things up at some point. Do not feel bad about making a mess. Do whatever’s necessary to make your story better. That’s all that matters.

[LoneDraft]

Thanks for confirming Scrivener wouldn’t have any issue with a ridiculous (big) number of documents. This isn’t something I was worried about (yet), but it’s good to know.

And I can clearly see what you mean with this interesting approach, staying most of the time at high level, even for editing (scrivening).

It’s just that for the moment I’d like to see the progress on each document (ex-label), and re-arrange the fragments (documents), and so I display the lower levels of the binder tree (in general not for all the branches).
And this makes the binder quite high, with some to scroll, loosing the overview of course. And moving a documents becomes slightly harder, or will use another technique (which I don’t complain about). At that time, I feel I start loosing the advantages of the binder (a little bit of drag).

[AmberV]

@LoneDraft

And moving a documents becomes slightly harder…

That at least is not inversely proportional to how large the binder gets, as in most list-based views. Almost every depiction of the icon throughout the project window can be dragged as a proxy for that item. So what you can do is select the thing you want to move, scroll to where it should be placed, and then drag and drop the icon from the editor header bar. I do mean from almost anywhere! Even a search result from the Quick Search in the toolbar can be dragged and dropped.

[kewms]

There’s also the Documents → Move To menu, which contains a super-compressed version of the entire Binder.