So I’ve been working on this novel for a while, but I’ve been struggling with chapters, scenes and wordcount. I’m not really great at breaking things down into chapters since I write such long scenes, but for each section of my novel, I was trying to reach 10,500 words. This was causing me a lot trouble. I didn’t like writing my scenes together in one word document because I’d always want to go back and change the previous scene every five minutes. That meant after I finished a section of scenes, I would have to manually add up their word count, hope it was close to what I was working towards,and if it wasn’t, go through all the scenes trying to see where I could add words.
In Scrivener, I don’t have to worry about that. All I have to do is click on my section folder, and it tells me how many words I have, and I don’t have to combat with ten open word windows in an effort to get things just right. It makes things so much easier. I even managed to finally get my first section up to a little over 10,500 words. I wish I would have discovered this so much sooner. I would have had my novel finished by now.
I’ve been running the beta for a month now - working well; only locked up once but that was due to another program locking up my computer. Thank you for developing this and I’ll be sure to let you know if I encounter any difficulties.
Thanks for sharing your experiences! The whole thing about breaking stuff down really is, in my opinion, one of the big lightbulb moments with Scrivener. Once you can get over the word processor born “file” notion, and see that the breaks in an outline are just essentially lines you’ve drawn through the page to mark off sections, I think the whole process just starts to make a whole lot more sense. There are probably two fundamental ways of working this way (either being suitable to those who pre-plan vs. those who don’t): (a) very strictly by structure and (b) totally regardless of structure. In the former you create bits of outline in terms of chapters and scenes and parts, or sections and sub-sections for non-fiction. With (b) you just disregard all of that as is convenient. Some sections might be broken down into tiny pieces—maybe you’ve got five sub-plots of converging in a tense climax and there is lots to track. But in other areas of the book things are more straightforward so a chapter-length file is no problem to work with in a conceptual fashion. I think with (b), to really take advantage of the compiler, one will eventually want to drift toward (a) with split & merge if they intend to use the compiler to generate titles and special formatting. That’s probably more important for non-fiction where sub-sections and sub-subsections are important. With fiction you can just leave everything below a certain level as straight text, and thus completely hide that it was ever in a bunch of small pieces to the reader.
Glad to hear your beta experiences have been drama-free.