Scrivener has some great tools for recording notes for your projects.
When writing or revising a project in Scrivener, you may want to make notes. Sometimes you make notes as you’re planning or writing to remind yourself of things to check, scenes to change, or characters to add. When revising your project, you may want to make other notes for content, tone, or style as you go through it.
Scrivener gives you a variety of tools for recording notes in your project. In this article, we will look at five of them and show you how to use them to record information about your projects when writing or revising.
Why record notes in Scrivener?
When you’re working on a long writing project, it comes together slowly like a jigsaw puzzle. Even if you write from beginning to end when you work on your project, ideas come to mind that you want to remember for later.
If you’ve already written your first draft and are starting the revision process, you come across many instances in your manuscript where you want to make changes, check facts, revise descriptions, change dialogue, and more. But you may not always want to make these changes immediately. You may want to make notes to highlight changes that need to be made after you’ve done more research, or when you’re in the right mindset to work on parts of your draft, such as dialogue.
Some notes apply to specific sentences or paragraphs of your project, and others are more general. Scrivener has several ways of recording notes that are ideal for different types of notes.
Record notes in the Inspector
One of the easiest ways to record notes is in Scrivener’s Inspector. The Inspector is the sidebar at the right of the window; if you don’t see it, choose View > Show Inspector. When you click any file in the Binder, then click the leftmost icon above the Inspector, you see two sections: Synopsis and Notes.
Both of these sections are connected to the file you’ve selected in the Binder. You can use the Synopsis section to write a short summary of what the file contains. And you can use the Notes section to write down any notes you want for that scene or chapter. These may be plot points or beats you want to add, changes you want to make, or things you need to fact-check in the future.
For more on the Inspector, see Get to Know the Scrivener Inspector.
Insert comments and annotations in your manuscript
If you need to make a note about a specific sentence, description, or piece of dialogue, inserting a comment in your manuscript is the best way. Comments are directly attached to specific text, and you can go through all your comments at any time in the Inspector when you want to resolve them.
To add a comment, select some text in a file, then choose Insert > Comment or press Command-Shift-* (Mac) or Shift+F4 (Windows). The new comment displays in the Inspector with the date and time, and this text is selected. You can start typing to replace it, but if you want to keep the date and time, just press the right arrow key before you start typing.
You view comments by clicking the rightmost icon above the Inspector. Like Inspector Notes, Comments are attached to individual files. When you click the Comments icon, you see only the comments in the file that is selected in the Binder.
However, if you’re in Scrivenings mode, you see comments for all files in the current selection.
You can also use inline annotations, which are comments that don’t display in the Inspector but only in the body of your text. Position your cursor where you want to add the annotation, then choose Insert > Inline Annotation and start typing.
For more on comments, see Use Annotations, Comments, & Footnotes in Your Scrivener Projects.
Use the Scratchpad
Scrivener’s Scratchpad is a floating window that lets you jot down notes at any time, even when you’re viewing another app. You can use the Scratchpad to make notes about your project or to store miscellaneous information such as links and other texts. Notes you record in the Scratchpad are not linked to specific texts or even specific projects. All Scratchpad notes are accessible no matter which project is open.
To open the Scratchpad, choose Window > Scratchpad or press Command-Shift-Return (Mac) or Alt+Shift+Enter (Windows). These keyboard shortcuts toggle the Scratchpad, so you can press the shortcut to display the window, paste or type some text, and then press it again to hide the Scratchpad. Once the Scratchpad is open, you can hide Scrivener or put it in the background. This is a great way to do research on the internet and make notes that you can later access from any of your Scrivener projects.
For more on using the Scratchpad, see How to Use the Scrivener Scratchpad to Collect Research and Capture Ideas.
Store files in the Notes folder
Most Scrivener templates have a Notes folder in the Binder. This folder has some special properties.
If you click the Bookmarks icon above the Inspector, then choose Project Bookmarks, you see, by default, three folders: Characters, Places, and Notes. (See Use Bookmarks in Scrivener Projects to Link to Internal and External Files for more on accessing bookmarks).
If you add files to the Notes folder, you can view them in the Binder, but you can also view their contents in the Inspector while viewing other Binder items in the Editor.
If any of these three folders contain files, a disclosure triangle displays to the right of the folder name. Click this triangle to bring up a menu showing its contents, then click a file to display its contents in the Inspector.
These five methods of recording notes in your Scrivener projects make it easy to jot down ideas, store research, and create reminders for things to change when you’re writing or revising your draft.
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.