Use Custom Metadata in Scrivener to Manage Characters

In How to Add Custom Metadata to the Scrivener Inspector, we looked at how to add custom metadata to your Scrivener projects. This is additional information you can add to your files to help you sort, search, and filter your project.

In this article, we’ll look at one application of using custom metadata: how you can use it to manage characters.

Working with lots of characters

Some novels only have a few characters, but some may have dozens. Many fantasy novels can have a dozen main characters and many more minor characters. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series has more than one hundred characters, with some three dozen point of view characters across the series. In addition, they are organized in houses, and it can be helpful to have information about these characters handy when viewing scenes and chapters.

Some mysteries also have a lot of characters. Many whodunits have minor characters who aren’t considered as suspects, but think of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, where there are 13 suspects who appear individually or with other characters as the book progresses. When writing a novel like this, you need to keep track of when the suspects appear and what they say.

With this many characters, you probably prepare an outline before you start. It can be helpful to add custom metadata to each of your chapters so you know which characters appear when, and to ensure that the story moves from character to character. In novels with fewer characters, you might want to use custom metadata to keep track of multiple timelines or character arcs.

You can create lists for metadata with character names; you click a list and choose, say, which POV character is in a chapter. You can also use open text fields, where you can add anything you want. You could add multiple character names, or a character and a description of their state in a given chapter.

How to work with custom metadata

Custom metadata fields let you add data to files that go beyond Scrivener’s file titles, synopses, labels, and status markers. You can view custom metadata in the Inspector’s metadata tab, and as columns in the Outliner.

There are four types of custom metadata: Text, Checkbox, List, and Date fields. You access these from the Project > Project Settings > Custom Metadata pane.

You can use custom metadata in several ways:

• You can create text fields for any information you want to track, such as character names, locations, or events.
• You can use list fields where you choose from a preset list. You can use these for POV characters, character roles (protagonist or antagonist; investigator or suspect), locations, or events that take place in the narrative. Or, if your novel spans a long period of time, you might want to add a field for each character’s age so you know where you are in your overall timeline.
• You can use checkbox fields to track character development milestones, such as when a character performs certain actions that are important in the plot.
• And you can use date fields to mark events in a long timeline.

Once you’ve defined the custom metadata fields in your project, you can fill them out for each element in your Binder. If you create custom character sheets for your project, you can include custom metadata in these document templates, and you can choose the appropriate template when adding a new character.

How to leverage custom metadata in your Scrivener projects

You can always view the custom metadata for any file in the Inspector if the Metadata icon is selected. But you can use custom metadata in ways that allow you to search project, finding all files with specific metadata.

One way of doing this is through collections. A collection is a search of the project according to any criteria you want. You could search for the name of a character, a location, a word or phrase, or anything in your project, but you can also constrain your search to only look for custom metadata.

Click in the search field, then click the small magnifying glass and look in the second section of the dropdown menu. This is where the custom metadata that you’ve set up appears.

Select one of these, then type the word you want to search for in that type of custom metadata.

You can save these searches so you can access their results quickly. You could search for each of your custom metadata entries and save each collection. As you progress in your project and add new files, displaying the collection includes those added files. To view all your collections, choose View > Show Collections.

For more on working with collections, see How to Use Scrivener’s Collections to Access Groups of Files or Search Results Quickly.

View custom metadata in Scrivener’s Outliner

Scrivener’s Outliner lets you choose from a number of columns to display. When using the Outliner, you may only display the title, the synopsis, and perhaps the status of each file and its word count. When you define custom metadata, the Outliner makes new columns available according to that metadata. Click the > icon at the top right of the Outliner, and you’ll see your custom metadata near the bottom of the menu.

Check any item to display it as a column in the Outliner. Here, I’ve chosen to display the POV Character and Location metadata items. This allows you to see, at a glance, which characters and locations are used in the files.

This article only scratches the surface of using custom metadata to manage characters in Scrivener projects. Any information you want attached to your files about your characters can be set up as custom metadata. While most projects don’t need this extra information, you may find it invaluable if you have lots of characters in your project.