My Other is for classroom or lecture presentations.
Draft: nothing there
Research: week by week folders containing
Text, Images (jpg or gif), PDF files, Web links, etc.
Arranged in an order that outlines the discussion.
This creates a far more versatile array
Than PowerPoint or KeyNote can handle.
And most files are simply drag-and-drop.
One problem in structuring the Binder according to logical developments such as Acts is that, well, it prevents the author from splitting a chapter in the middle of a scene.
It does help the author in early stages of composition to consider the Work in a logical manner, and so can help to get a solid working outline. But once involved with the actual writing of the first draft, this must be thrown out to allow for the sort of free form cross-cutting that movies and tv scripts enjoy.
Even structuring the Binder in terms of scenes limits the author by preventing a break in the middle of a scene.
So some writers might like to structure the Binder in logical breaks such as Acts and Scenes without regard to chapters (and chapter titles), and then compile the solidly-structured First Draft as one long thread. Outside Scrivener in a word processor, working on second and future drafts, chapter breaks can be added according to other considerations such as moments of dramatic suspense or chapter length.
Or staying within Scrivener, the author could Merge all the sub-documents of the Draft folder once a satisfactory logical structure is reached, and then split it down again according to ‘reading units’ in later drafts.
Just a thought.
- asotir
I generally have folders for Chapters, with anywhere from zero to lots of subsections underneath.
But I mostly put in my own headers, rather than having Scrivener do it for me. This is partly because I’ve been using Scrivener since before it got so sophisticated about structure, but mostly because the document names that make sense to me don’t necessarily work as titles in the finished work.
I’m not sure I’ve ever used the Summary compile, though, so I’m not sure I’m the target audience for this question.
Katherine
My main Scrivener project holds a Series with the following structure: Book folder, Chapter subfolder, Scene/section Document, besides the separate research and story data folders. Chapter folders set to preserve formatting; these folder-documents contain the <$Title> tag; and the font varies for each chapter.
I kind of love-hate the Compile feature, since it unifies the font settings nicely, but it rips away italics and my quote fonts. (I use antique-style fonts for certain quotations from books/scrolls my characters are reading or quoting in their speech.) I’ll probably sort that out eventually, but I haven’t taken the time since I mostly use the Compile feature to send an epub copy to my Android for review on the road, or to make a pdf of a draft.
Just FYI, the File -> Compile -> Transformations pane defines how Compile handles italics and similar issues. The -> Formatting pane lets you tell it what to do about fonts.
Katherine
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Make sure the font you’re using in compile has an italic variant installed on your machine. Italics should automatically be preserved (unless they’re converted to underlines, which is handled in the Transformations settings of compile, as Katherine stated), but they require the proper font; the OS X text system doesn’t just fake them by slanting the regular typeface.
For the sections with special fonts, in the Mac version you can select them in the editor and choose Format > Formatting > Preserve Formatting to wrap them in a pale blue box, excluding them from the formatting overrides during compile. (You can further refine how Preserve Formatting works by clicking the Options button in the Formatting pane of Compile, but in this case you’ll want to leave “Preserve Formatting only preserves” deselected, since you want the font itself preserved.)
Serendipitous. I was going to ask about this 
Thanks
Marta
The feature is Mac-only at the moment–I had Mac on the brain when I wrote it, since the thread is a Mac one, but I realise the poster I was replying to doesn’t state if it’s Win or Mac. On Windows for the moment you’ll need to deselect the compile formatting override option entirely if you want to preserve all the editor fonts, or, if it’s something that can be reformatted later, use something like text colour for those sections and compile without removing that (i.e. don’t select “Remove text color” in Transformations) and then use Word’s features for selecting all text with similar formatting and adjust the font there.
too bad, but thanks for clearing that up
I did a test compile using the “deselect the compile formatting override option entirely” which you suggested
It gave me exactly what I needed.
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Excellent!
I experimented around when I was familiarizing myself with Scrivener, but now?
I tend up use Novel with Chapters as my core template (No parts).
Then what I do is have a single folder into which I place several chapters/scenes. Try not to number them until I know where they really go, to avoid renumbering.
So I keep my structure pretty uncomplicated.
I use Scrivener for just about everything now. The only time I use Word is for stuff other people send me to edit.
Here are the different ways I use it:
NOVELS/SERIES
Combining these two because the processes are very similar. Basically in a novel project, I use folders for chapters and then I use a different text file for each scene. This makes it very easy to reorganize or shuffle as necessary.
I’ve recently begun to experiment with writing series—several short stories of 10-15K featuring the same characters. Each series has its own project file, but all the stories for a given series are in the same project file. In the compile group, first thing I do is create a major folder (and change the icon to one of the book icons) and then I label that the title of the story. Then the chapters and scenes go in that file. Makes it easy to keep the stories organized and also easy to access if I ever need to refer back to previous stories.
I usually have a brief description of each chapter before I write, just a few sentences, and I keep this open in the top screen of the split-screen so that I can easily refer to it.
SCRIPTS
I just used Scrivener for writing a comic script and oh my god, was it ever amazing. So easy to organize everything. Puts Final Draft and Celtx to shame. This is much more straightforward—folder for an issue and a separate text document for each page.
Haven’t used it for screenplays yet, but will be writing some of those this semester (I’m a part-time grad student studying screenwriting at the moment).
CLASSES
Each class gets its own Scrivener file, and I’ll import the different research documents into them, with a different document for each paper.
ARTICLES
I write list articles for WhatCulture, so for these, each article will have its own folder and each entry on the list gets its own text document. Then in the split-screen, I’ll have the title of each entry in the top document to refer to.
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I use Scrivener for writing my nonfiction book, with a project for each major section (probably nine of those), with several chapters in each.
I also use it for writing medium- and long-form journalism, generally stories > 1000 words. Each story is a project, with each section of the story given a subdocument.
In both the book and stories, I import all the research into the research folder.
I’m looking forward to trying it with a play after this book is done, or possibly the next one. Hadn’t thought to use it for my classes but now that I know others are, I may consider it…
First, let me say this is one of the most useful software applications I have ever purchased in over 20 years!
I use it for a variety of project types from screenplay to novel to paper and report writing. I also use it as a kind of project management system where there isn’t actually a particular central document, which is not at all what it is meant for. These are projects I manage involving several team members. I plan out tasks for my team members and am able to categorize them using labels and keywords, attach task numbers and level-of-effort estimates (using the custom meta-data) and write up task ‘statements of work’ as separate files which i then compile and deliver (in portions) to the team.
It is a mis-use of Scriv as a project management system, but I so like the application that I coerce these project management activities into it rather than use other PM software tools.
But PLEASE – don’t start changing features on Scrivener to aim at making it a PM tool. Stay focused on what it is meant to be!
My biggest fear for the product is that you start adding so many additional features to make it do more than your original scope and then the UI gets increasingly more complex and ‘deharmonized’. (Eclipse is a good example – it is an open-source productivity tool for writing software that started out great. Over the years, though, it has had so many add-on features and plugins cobbled onto it that it has lost coherence and become a complete mess.)
I use Scrivener for writing articles for scientific journals (forest research), so I have made my own template for this. The draft folder is split in the various sections of normal articles (IMRaD structure - Intro, Material and methods, Results, and Discussion). Each part then has it’s subparts, to make sure I don’t forget anyting.
When I start writing an article I quite early decide what parts to include in the Results, and create sub-parts for each kind of measurement or calculation, and then create the same sub-parts in the other sections.
Generally each project is multibook, or at the very least something that has multiple, publishable parts, so I have my draft folder divided into folders for each publishable bit (volume, short story, essay, blog post, whatever, though its generally a volume, one book in a series). Inside each of those folders is just a list of text documents, each a scene in the book. Chapters aren’t terribly important to my process. Sometimes each scene is going to be a chapter when the thing is finally laid out. Sometimes I’ll have chapter structures that I will end up building out of extant material close to the end of the process, but they don’t inform things now, as I’m generating content in Scrivener.
Outside of the draft folder I keep folders for Characters, Settings, Props and Undetermined, to keep my various notes categorized, but then generally just keep the documents inside each alphabetical so I can find things visually fast enough that I don’t generally need to search for anything, This reservoir of notes applies across the series, so its nice to have it all in there more and more as I progress through the series, and is likely the part that does the most evolution in structure since I’m living with it the whole time.
I don’t find hierarchical outlining to have much use in Scrivener beyond compartmentalizing things to keep them out of each others’ hair.
I am new to writing books but have been writing large business documents for decades. Though I am a newb I am surprised so many writers here pre-decide on their chapter structure as they write, or before they write. Chapters seem to me to be one of the least important aspect of the writing/creating process and I expect to tackle it only when the whole book is finished.
saoir, I can’t give a you a definitive explanation - possibly because every writer’s approach will probably be different - but I’ll give you mine.
I’ve two reasons for planning chapters, and, indeed, scenes, from the outset. One is for my own satisfaction as I write. Much more than the word-count, chapters give me milestones by which I can measure my writing progress.
The other reason is possibly more fundamental, at least for me. I believe that there’s a necessary rhythm to novels, and to chapters and to scenes. (When I wrote business reports, I used to believe that there was a natural rhythm to them, too, which one ignored at one’s peril 
- but that’s another story.) Of course, for thrillers there’s the attraction of the cliff-hanger chapter ending, but that’s very far from the end of it. Every genre has its natural rhythm in macro and micro forms, in terms of emotion, drama, conflict, the introduction of new characters, the termination of others, set-ups, pay-offs and so on - at least, so I believe. And the beginning, ends and middles of chapters and scenes are part of it. Readers become used to these rhythms; subconsciously they can accept departures from the norm for the genre, but if a narrative falls consistently “off-beat”, the reader will usually detect that something isn’t quite right.
Of course, you could ignore all this in the first version, and put it right in the re-write. But given that it involves something quite basic, that would possibly require a lot more work. So chapters and scenes are there from the beginning - not immutably, but as a way of “laying down a beat”, which you can elaborate or modify later.
Thanks Hugh - I think I have been reading too many books recently where there seems to be no real reason behind chapters other than a break.