Hi … I am new still learning Scrivener and was wondering what folks out there do to track their setups and then connect them with reveals in later chapters? I feel like I want to highlight the setup I wrote and have it added to a list that I can then later highlight some part in the future and connect it to an earlier setup or multiple earlier setups. I want to make sure that I didn’t leave something hanging.
Is there a functionality in Scrivener that can help me with this more automatically than using Comments? Ideas, thoughts? Much appreciated!!!
Keywords, maybe? You can have more than one per document, so each document could be assigned a character, a keyword for the relevant subplot, a keyword for setup/resolution, etc.
I use them to follow threads.
Or reference other passages.
Mark redundancies (either story-wise or language-wise).
Follow and fix story conflicts. (The type you don’t want in your finished book, that is.)
…Anything that requires to navigate to a precise location (and fast), really…
Naming a tag a short name that pertains to its nature/reason-to-be (which I didn’t explain in the post I just linked to – that only came after), makes it that you at all time have kind of a layer of outline visible on top of your actual writing. I find it very useful, I rarely am confused as of what I wrote earlier in the novel, or “what is to come, already?”. (You don’t have to tag everything all over the place, for that. But if you have [=Jenny’sHurt] here and there, mixed up with other tags of the sort, the big picture becomes visible at all times. As an overlay, kind of. – It works.)
Plus, if I global search for [=Jenny’sHurt], I get a list of all documents where the tag is to be found, and can quickly follow/work/fix the sub-story of her getting hurt and why and whatever the consequences are…
. . . . . .
On the side I keep a special document where I also stick the tags, and keep notes about the reason for each of them to be.
It is part of my revision process to make sure, as a final step, that this list of problematic whatevers is cleared. (I mean the conflicts and redundancies ; tags I use to mark threads I don’t care.)
That is an interesting technique. I love keywords and do one for every single character and can do for each mention of a subplot/ reveal. To tie to a specific location use comments as can strip out during compile. Could even use same color for reveal/ subplot for related keyword and comment. Vincent’s idea of a key is very good and if bookmark file very easy to get to
Hey Vincent_Vincent,
Wow, ok! There is a lot there and I just started to go through it. Thanks a bunch for that link, I will definitely go through it and report back. I really appreciate it!
Just a thought: If you are not using for anything else the text area of the index cards associated with each document, these can be a handy place to track where certain piece of information are dropped or whatever. Then corkboard view will give you an overview of it all. Also, if you associated different Labels with different threads you are tracking, then Scrivener’s swimlane index card view will give you an overview of all of them, teased out, in story order, by thread.