Actually in need of a pair of ears... or eyes. ...or four.

[tedrage]

Hey guys! Any of you writing on projects in Scrivener (bless) that are practically growing out of the hard drive? I mean, Scrivener is such a – in lack of a perfect word: BEAUTIFUL – program to remember all your scribblings, remain calm when you've lost the plot yourself, and so on and so forth. Scrivener is actually becoming my second brain - no, not life. I mean it! The program just sits there on the screen, remembering e v e r y t h i n g I've punched down on the keyboard... When I can't even remember that I put THAT list of plot twists over there, and, and, this list of characters here, right under the folder "Characters: part I, II, III, IV, V", so I magically make another folder with the same name and content.... Scrivener is just too damn good! Tell me, is there anyone here with problems linked to anything I described above? Nighty night

[jebni]

Categorise things a bit more rigorously in your folder structure? Search? And use keywords, which you can browse in a floating "heads-up display"?

[AmberV]

Problems, no! It sounds like you are using Scrivener the way it should be used. Granted, there are probably thousands of ways it "should" be used, it's a very flexible program.

You might like the Scratch Pad feature, or the Make New Link feature. Both of these let you just dump ideas out without really thinking about where it should go or what it should be called yet. Scratch Pad is a floating window, and you can organise the text of that however you like. There are two nice things about Scratch Pad that come to mind: a) you don't have to think "meta" you can just open it and type---then sort later. b) it has a very nice tool which lets you select text and append that text to other documents. This way, if you have an idea about a specific character you can just write that down in the scratch pad and go back to the scene you were working on. Later you can select the idea and shuttle it over to the character sheet.

Making a new link is easiest done by putting your cursor in a page and pressing Cmd-L. This will make a new document, link to it, and let you start typing in it. The automatically generated name includes the date, so it makes a nice diary function too.

Pressing Cmd-N from anywhere will make a new index card/text document immediately, so this is great for capturing the brilliant thought you just had, before it slips away after you start poking around for the right place to put it. Capture first, place later!

[klcorridon]

Thanks for the tips, AmberV. I haven't even begun to exploit many of Scrivener's features.

[tedrage]

Categorise things a bit more rigorously in your folder structure? Search? And use keywords, which you can browse in a floating "heads-up display"?

Thanks for the tips, both jebni and AmberV. Using Scrivener day in and day out, but, as you can see, I don't remember to visit the forum, or replies, often enough.

Hopefully that will change, "one beautiful day".

[IJB]

Yes, I know how you feel.

Joely xx