Scrivener questions

[tielan]

Curious, because I've gotten a variety of responses about Scrivener.

You don't have to answer all these questions precisely, they're mostly to make you think about how you use Scrivener. (Or how you don't use Scrivener and why.)

Do you write novels, longfic, shortfic, drabbles? Do you write your story chronologically (or in the order the scenes are in your story)? Are you a plotter or a pantser? Do you make notes before you start, while you write? How complicated are your plots? Do you have detailed scene/POV notes';What happens if you rethink your story?

If you've used Scrivener, how have you found it? What parts do you use most often and how do you use them?

At least one person has mentioned that they use Scrivener for their notes, and then swap in and out of Word to do their actual writing. Does this work for anyone else?

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Scrivener lets me write nonlinearly--linear word processor requires me to write linearly, it seems, because until I discovered Scrivener I hadn't thought I was capable of nonlinear writing--and lets me put notes in the same 'file' as the story, and I think the shortest project I've done with it is 2500 words. I've got two projects that are stacks of original short stories, where the project will hopefully eventually be a published short story collection. (Depends if I finish them, nothing else. Amazon self-publishing, baby!) I like it, but I'm still on the learning curve. I only just found how to make the ruler appear.

Also, my inkingitout word count is a Scrivener project. ALL the words for the year in files by day and folders by month.

[copracat]

I find it really useful organisationally. For example, my last two remix redux stories are in the same Scrivener file. Each year has its own folder. Each folder has a number of files, for example:
1. A file for my assignment with relevant links to FAQ etc
2. A file for each of my remixee's stories that have caught my remix interest, a link to the story, a summary of the story and scratch paper ideas about how I might go about each one. A list of things I'll need to do like watch specific episodes or research, transcripts etc. The story the gets most developed at this stage is likely the one I end up writing. Here is where I use Scrivener for process
3. A file for the story. There might be a couple of these if I start writing more than one to see how they work out. If a story is long enough I might have a separate file to outline the story and move it about a bit separate to the story text.
4. A header file for posting if the posting rules require it.

Depending on the size of the story there might be more or less files.

I like Scrivener for the snapshot function, the pinboard view, being able to write notes on the pinboard cards seperate to their file contents, the word count tracker and I keep working files synced with dropbox to PlainText so I can work on them on my iPad.

I also keep a Scrivener file for journal post drafts and move the draft files from the draft folder to a posted folder. I can keep html templates, too.

I imagine it depends on how you work. Before I bought Scrivener, I used to work on TextWrangler which was previously BBEdit.

[azarias]

I've found Scrivener a great help for certain projects and next to useless for others. For stories with a more or less linear structure, I use Word, or even Notepad if I just want to put the words down as simply as possible. But for nonlinear stories or ones with plot threads that diverge and converge often, Scrivener's a godsend.

The Comics Big Bang fic I'm writing now is mostly in flashback, for example, and the sequence of the flashbacks isn't fixed. The only thing I know for sure is they're not going to be arranged in chronological order. I wind up shuffling them around every time I open the file. Scrivener makes that easy, since I have them in their own folder, with each flashback on a different text card that I can drag around the corkboard at will.

I'm also finding it handy for working on a very long and complex piece that I'm unlikely to ever finish but am having fun chopping at. There are a lot of "unknowns" in that one still, and I find it easier to accommodate those in Scrivener with some notes and a brief sketch than with [SCENE GOES HERE] in Word.

[justhuman]

I've only used it for a long fic -- I'm up around 100K. It's an NCIS with casefic. I use the reference section to store notes on the case fic - keeping track of the names of the extras. I also have reference data in there too.

I started chapters for all the major bullets I want to happen in the future. I still write mostly linearly. That being said, I do jump ahead to those future chapters and scribble in scenes. They'll be rewritten later to jive with what comes before, but I needed them out of my head. It also gives me the ability to test drive a story track.

Up on the Scrivener forums they even say that it's not the greatest publishing too. I pull my ready chapters into Word for final editing and beta.