How to Use Scrivener for Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding is the creation of a fictional world and its characteristics, often used in science fiction and fantasy novels. When building a world, you create settings and locations where your story takes place; develop characters, often in multiple locations or planets; and create history, lore, and sometimes even language. Worldbuilding can involve such elements as economy, history, and mythology, and its scope may be limited to a single village or town or may be as broad as an entire universe.

Scrivener’s features make it a perfect tool for developing the world of your novel. Here’s how you can leverage Scrivener’s features for world-building.

Note: this article brings together many of Scrivener’s powerful features and contains links to articles going into detail about these features on this blog. To fully appreciate how Scrivener can be used for worldbuilding, check out the linked articles if you’re unfamiliar with these features.

Manage lots of characters

One of the most complex tasks in a novel with lots of world-building is keeping track of characters. Scrivener’s character sketches allow you to note down information about your characters, whether you have a handful or hundreds of them. Within the Characters folder in the Scrivener Binder, you can create subfolders for towns, cities, regions, or planets. Or you can create folders for related characters, such as families, factions, or allies. As your novel progresses, you can refer to these files to make sure your characters’ backstories, actions, and speech are consistent.

The ability to create internal links to files in Scrivener allows you to link scenes and chapters to character sketches, and other types of files mentioned below, in the Notes for any files as you’re writing. This allows you to quickly jump to these files to check any information pertinent to your story.

And you can split the Scrivener editor to see two files at once, such as a file where you’re writing and a character sketch, or you can open character sketches in copyholders, special panes in the Editor, or in Quick Reference windows, floating windows outside the main Scrivener window.

Manage settings and locations

Similar to character sketches, Scrivener projects allow you to create setting sketches. You can use these files to describe towns and cities, or planets and solar systems, in as much detail as you need. As with character sketches, you can create subfolders in the Places folder in the Scrivener Binder. You can link to these files, open them side by side with another file in the Editor, or in their own windows.

If you’re using real locations in your project, you can add photos of those settings, which will help you better describe them in your prose.

Use custom character and setting sketch templates

While Scrivener includes character and setting sketch templates, you can create your own, and you can create as many as you want. You could create character sketches that are different for each group of characters, such as people who live on different planets. You can choose these custom templates when you create new character and setting sketches, and you can file them away in any subfolders you’ve created. See How to Create and Use Custom Document Templates in Scrivener.

Store other types of notes

In addition to special folders for characters and places, along with a research folder meant to store any type of document you need for your project, you can also create folders in the Binder to store any type of notes. Make sure these folders are not in the top-level draft or manuscript folder, so their word count won’t be added to your total project word count, and they won’t be compiled.

Some Scrivener projects already have a Notes folder in the Binder. But if yours doesn’t, you can add a folder and even add a custom icon similar to the default Notes folder icon.

As with any folder in the Scrivener Binder, you can create subfolders and store as many files as you want inside a notes folder. See 5 Ways to Record Notes in Your Scrivener Project.

Use labels to mark files by POV character or setting

As you progress in a complex project, you may want some way of seeing at a glance which point-of-view character you use in a scene or chapter, or which location it is set in. You can use labels for this. Scrivener labels are extremely flexible, and there are various ways of displaying them in the Binder. You can either use the default labels and rename them, or create as many labels as you want with custom colors. In the View > Use Label Color In menu, you can tell Scrivener to display these colors on files in the Binder in different ways.

Use custom metadata to mark files

Custom metadata is another way to tag files, and it is visible in the Inspector or in the Outliner. You can create custom metadata for anything you want: characters, settings, events, specific times, and more. This is especially useful in the Outliner, where you can have custom metadata display in a column for each file, showing character, setting, or any other information you want to focus on. See How to Add Custom Metadata to the Scrivener Inspector.

Use keywords to mark files

Keywords are words you add to files in the Inspector that you can use to find files when searching your project. For example, you could have a keyword for each of your main characters in the files where they appear. You could have a keyword for each town, city, or planet when action takes place in those settings. You can then use Project Search to search for these keywords and find all the files that contain them. See Use Keywords to Manage Your Scrivener Projects for more on this feature.

Use collections to view files that contain certain elements of your world

Scrivener’s collections allow you to view groups of files that you create manually (standard collections) or that result from a search (search collections). If you’ve added keywords to your files, as mentioned above, you can search for them in the Binder, and you can save a search collection with all the files containing each keyword. You can easily return to that collection when you want to look at those files.

As you can see above, Scrivener has a wide range of features for managing complex novels. While you probably won’t use all of these features, you can choose the ones that fit with your project and your style of organization.