Writing Software: Scrivener

[Montero]

Just downloaded Scrivener for Windows.

I'm part way into a manuscript, with lots of subsidiary documents. (Open Office)

How easy is it to transfer all of this into Scrivener? By transfer I don't just mean the physical importing of the documents but also making it all join up in the way that Scrivener is supposed to.

Or should I just play with the demo copy to see if I like it (buy it if I like it) and then start using Scrivener from the start of the next manuscript?

 

[choccoweeble]

Giving this a go, so far it's helping a lot with organisation of ideas, might even give that first novel a real crack instead of just talking about it!! Fingers crossed.

 

[Dozmonic]

Montero - how many subsidiary documents are you talking about? I think Scriv works with rtf documents, so you may be able to save as .rtf and copy them into a scriv project but I'm not 100% sure. I took a 20k book in OpenOffice and split it into about 25 scenes, separating into chapters, adding synopses etc. Took a little while to do but it meant I had the structure there, easy to manipulate and knew what was what.

 

[Anne Lyle]

Just downloaded Scrivener for Windows.

I'm part way into a manuscript, with lots of subsidiary documents. (Open Office)

How easy is it to transfer all of this into Scrivener? By transfer I don't just mean the physical importing of the documents but also making it all join up in the way that Scrivener is supposed to.

Scrivener can import RTF and DOC files very easily, and once you import them, it's just a matter of dragging them into the desired order in the document tree, like you would in a file manager window. The "joining up" part is managed from within the program, regardless of whether you imported material or typed it in Scrivener.

If you have a mixture of manuscript and notes, you should import them in two batches, into the Draft and Research folders respectively. Images and other media can be added to the Research folder using drag'n'drop.

(If you have one long document and you've marked your scene breaks with a specific character, you can also select the "import and split" option which will automatically create a bunch of separate documents.)

N.B. I'm basing this on the Mac version - Windows has most of the latest features but not all.

 

[Montero]

Thanks everyone.

I note that Scrivener doesn't have a timeline tool for the Windows version.

By timeline - this is where you put which event comes after which? Just to make really sure I am understanding this.

What about multiple timelines - or perhaps call them event lines?

I have several groups of people, sometimes in sub-groups, who are interacting in a relatively small location, sometimes in isolation, sometimes criss-crossing. At the moment I have a spreadsheet on the go, which broadly speaking has events on the rows and who on the column - and the action/reader's view is moving back and forth across the columns. This is (trying) to keep everything in a logical order, ensure that people don't meet when they shouldn't but do finish up in the right place at the right time and I don't have to spend a lot of time shuttling people around for their next entrance as it were.
Also makes sure that all the pieces of the story are there.

So Scrivener for Windows might not handle that without the timeline add-on that doesn't work in Windows?

What about yWriter - how well would it handle that?

 

[Dozmonic]

I don't use a timeline when writing, so I can't really say much about it. What I do is assign scenes different colours depending on whose POV it is and I can see what's going on in each arc according to the synopses.

 

[Montero]

Thanks everyone.

Currently working through Scrivener tutorial.

 

[Montero]

I'm suspecting the answer to this question is "no", but thought I'd ask anyway.

In Open Office Writer, Insert - Comment gets you a nice yellow (or blue or whatever) post-it sort of box in the right hand margin where you can doodle notes.
Very useful for putting in comments to come back to, or during proof-reading flagging up things and working on variations of sentences to be inserted later.

Going through Scrivener, all I can find is Inline Annotation which is not at all the same thing. It does say in the tutorial that Inline Annotations can be turned into comments on exporting.

Is there any equivalent of Insert-Comment? Something that puts comments on a line or word from the text into a box in the right hand margin?

 

[Dozmonic]

There's the inspector which has document notes. Hit the white i in the blue circle in the top right and document notes opens up in the bottom right of your screen. This is unique for each file within your document

 

[Montero]

There's the inspector which has document notes. Hit the white i in the blue circle in the top right and document notes opens up in the bottom right of your screen. This is unique for each file within your document

Ta. That is good for section level comments.

What I'm after is unique to a sentence within the file comments. What insert-comments does in Open Office writer, is that you put the cursor next to a word in a sentence, press Insert Comments, and you get a place marker in the sentence, with a line leading to the yellow sticky in the right margin. You can finish up with multiple stickies to a page, to the point they overlap each other (not desirable to do that, just illustrating the number I sometimes use per page in a document).

Inline Annotations does allow you to do notes at sentence level, but I don't like having all the red scribbles in the text, I'd rather have the notes in the right margin.

 

[Anne Lyle]

You're not going to get that in Scrivener, I suspect - the word-processor part is deliberately kept simple. If you want full annotation, you need a "real" word processor like Word or OO Writer.

 

[Dozmonic]

I don't know of a way to do that because it's not something I use even in OO I'm afraid dude, sorry!

 

[Montero]

Ah
Also been delving into yWriter. I like the plainer layout (probably the science/programming background) and the character notes but that doesn't seem to have the insert-comments either though it does have timeline stuff for Windows.

Now downloading Storybook - it says its a plotting tool separate from Word processing, so I think going to give that a trial run for plotting and stick with Open Office Writer for the manuscript for the time being. Make far too much use of Insert Comments to give it up, but struggling having plotting across text and spreadsheet docs.

 

[Dozmonic]

I did like yWriter, especially its word count log feature. I only use Scriv because it's better crossplatform

 

[Montero]

Just started playing with Storybook and the start of the Tutorial is to create a character. Reasonable screen that has various options to fill in (if you want to - only a couple are mandatory). Includes birthday, eye colour, occupation and gender. But it only offers Male/Female. Hah, this is science fiction!

I think I might have a brief wander to see if the screen can be customised, have buttons added. Yes there are free format note screens behind it which might do the job nicely, but where is the options for "number of tentacles", "telepath/not telepath" and so on.

Actually, got the bit about eye colour wrong - it is the colour assigned to the character for use in the tool.

 

[Montero]

You're not going to get that in Scrivener, I suspect - the word-processor part is deliberately kept simple. If you want full annotation, you need a "real" word processor like Word or OO Writer.

Um. I've talked with Scriverner support and it is there in the latest Mac version, but not yet in Windows. (They have suggested a work-around for Windows which I am hoping to have time to try in the next couple of days.)

I'd recommend trying the functionality as I find comments very useful. Can use it for such things as tagging a sentence to say "not good enough, come back to it" when you can't quite "hit the right note" as it were.



Oh, and would also like to say that I am impressed with Scrivener support - here I am testing a free version and they answered my query in less than 24 hours, understood what I wanted first time and gave a useful answer.

 

[Anne Lyle]

Yes, Keith and Dave are lovely! Glad to hear that Scrivener can provide what you want - I never do much fancy stuff on the word-processing side, as I prefer to mark up my manuscript on the iPad (using a PDF copy in iAnnotate).

 

[Montero]

Have yet to have the time to test the several suggested work-arounds - it is a bit more involved than the couple of mouse clicks (that I currently use for Insert-Comments) so might turn out to be too time consuming - or might be fine.

Anyway, if I can establish that this feature will work well enough for what I want to do, I will then try out more of the tutorial on Scrivener. Still not quite got my head around the intentions of how the plotting tool is used (best phrase I can think of to express what I mean). I had the working assumption that someone would aim to do their entire manuscript in all its stages within the plotting tool, as you are then working in the one piece of software so that when proof reading leads to changes in character detail or plot outline you are right there where you do the updates.
Clearly you don't.
Not even heard of the tool you are using. pdf sounds like it can't be edited.

Working in Open Office with Insert-Comments, you then have an editable manuscript with the notes in the right hand margin, so when you are in a dealing with the comments phase of the work, you can type in immediately and remove the comment once it is done. (Or annotate it to say, this is best fix, is it good enough or do I need to try again.)
I just save it as a new version before I start and maintain a version numbering system on the drafts.

Just wondered - do you have the time to describe the workflow of the way you use Scrivener? (Or have you done that already and I've forgotten?)

 

[Dozmonic]

I'm happy to explain how I'm using it currently. The power of Scriv for me is that it can give overviews at ever increasing levels...

My dad and I are writing a series of kids' books. The first book's first draft we did entirely in OO/whatever he used on Mac. As such it was written in a linear fashion and the problems we found were when it came to redrafting. Even a few thousand words is difficult to keep tabs on what is happening where when two people write it, especially in shorter scenes used for kids' stuff.

The second book was started straight in Scriv once we had talked and had a very, very basic idea of what we wanted it to be about. The image below is an idea of how we're going about this...

"Book overview" down in the bottom left is the book separated into the theme of each act, along with ideas of what we wanted the plot and pinch points to be, as well as the turning point. This was our map and from that we created synoposes on the set chapters in which those pivotal points took place.

Whoever is taking charge of writing at the time will carry on from where we left of, taking the story forward, deciding what scenes are worth writing and doing a first draft of them. If we have ideas of what we'd like to see in the future we create a rough scene in the "future scenes" folder, and in our handover notes we'll mention in a bit more detail what we wanted to have happen.

We found this way of working, being able to readily see how much wordage a section was carrying, what the ideas were, the research (placed in the research folder, primarily visual ideas there as we use handover notes for specifics) and the synoposes; all this was vastly superior to having a single document. It was so useful I transcribed the first book into Scriv and we're using it for redrafting (you can compile the document just as synoposes, which helps massively for an overview AND for writing synoposes with enough info for you to know what's going on).

What scriv gives us is a way of keeping tabs of the story as a whole, communicating visually and verbally our ideas for advancing a story.

We use document notes on each scene and chapter to specify things that we'll look at on the next draft that aren't necessarily relevant to the current draft.

 

[Anne Lyle]

Still not quite got my head around the intentions of how the plotting tool is used (best phrase I can think of to express what I mean). I had the working assumption that someone would aim to do their entire manuscript in all its stages within the plotting tool, as you are then working in the one piece of software so that when proof reading leads to changes in character detail or plot outline you are right there where you do the updates.
Clearly you don't.

I don't really know what you mean by "the plotting tool". You mean the main window, where you type the text? To me, there is no "plotting tool" - there's just Scrivener! You have a text editor where you edit the individual documents that are going to be exported together as your finished manuscript, the Binder that shows the document tree (like Windows Explorer) and the Inspector, which shows metadata associated with individual documents. So yes, that's where you do all your work, if that's what you prefer.

Not even heard of the tool you are using. pdf sounds like it can't be edited.

You can't easily edit an PDF, no, but you can annotate it in a suitable application as if it were a paper printout and save it with those annotations merged in. The iPad application I use has various annotation tools, including a coloured pen (defaults to red, obviously!), a highlighter, and a text box you can type into, like the Track Changes box in Word.

I use it for the stage when I'm making notes about what needs fixing (plot holes, continuity errors), but want to avoid the temptation of fiddling with the actual text at the same time. No point fixing typos in a scene that I might delete later!

Just wondered - do you have the time to describe the workflow of the way you use Scrivener? (Or have you done that already and I've forgotten?)

I'm planning on doing a blog post about using Scrivener with the iPad, at the request of someone on Twitter. Don't know when that'll be, though!