Feedback Wanted: How do you structure your Scriv projects?

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.

Too many?

I think that chapters are at their best when they are nothing but a break; a form of hard punctuation used to help control the pacing of the piece.

Generally speaking (in my mind at least), if you are using large sections to dictate changes in tone, or substantial geographical, temporal or other shifts in perspective… then that’s a Part, not a Chapter.

Ultimately, though, it’s a question of semantics. There is no right way to write, and no right way to structure… as long as it works!

I think this is highly dependent on what you are writing. Text books have chapters for dramatically different reasons than fiction. Both reasons are legitimate and both are … on the surface … mutually exclusive. No?

Isn’t the same true of parts?

As to “no right way to write” I again disagree. The “right way” is highly dependent on the intention of the work. For me the right way is the way that puts a smile on my wife’s face. That style is not commercially viable. For folks in the each “style” there are clear standards that define the “right way”. Isn’t the definition of success as an author dependent on understanding the “right way” to express a concept for a work?

We definitely agree that the “standards used to express one authors version of the ‘right way’” may be malleable under many circumstances.

But I have no head. What do I know…

From a plethora of differing perspectives, that’s one word that perfectly sums up the writing process. Hairy-arsed or not, that’s the welder in you, coming out.
Vic

Just saying that most of the books I have read in the last couple of years have shown no pattern or flow in their use of chapters. More as you say, a hard pause, and an easy way of remembering where I stopped reading

I agree with you. Of course there are some stories that involve very distinctive sections where the story changes location or pace or another story appears. That would be an important use of chapters.

As it happens mine doesn’t appear to have this kind of structure. So I will just have to read through and choose places where I have the ‘feeling’ that a hard pause would fit there.

Related to this structuring question, I have worked with many many writers who use Scrivener (teaching workshops) and it seems to me that there are two basic “approaches” to structuring their manuscripts:

1. Text files as chapters–in which case they have a manuscript folder with a column of Level 1 text documents in the Binder (they build their scene breaks themselves manually into each chapter within the text file). When the work reaches a certain length or density they consider looking at Parts, but this is not as common I find (but I work with a lot of writers who are writing YA, mystery, romance and NOT epic length novels).

2. Folders as chapters–in which case each folder comprises text files that serve as scenes. I find this the best way to organize a manuscript and get the most benefit out of Scrivener.

Something I see that comes up often is the question of how to format or set a level for elements that are part of the manuscript, but not technically a scene or chapter: a prelude, epilogue, interstitial material between chapters, etc.

If you are using one of the above techniques (which most do)–then you can get into some tricky formatting issues when it comes to Compile. Most beginner and intermediate users of the program are very intimidated by the Compile settings and have difficulty learning the level settings and custom formatting for each level and the titles for those.

I have wondered if there might be a way to have a new text file designation/option for that set of documents that sit “outside the manuscript” but are embedded in it (like interstitial material, prologue, epilogue)–these text files would have a preset “as is” formatting; would have page break and title presets; and would not be treated as chapters or scenes for numbering purposes. Similar to how there exists a Title Page template (only that sits outside the manuscript in Front Matter), this would be a text file option that sits within the manuscript folder, but is treated differently.

Have I explained this well enough? Thanks for considering.

I’m a new Scrivener user coming over from Word 2013 after 15 years of use. I found it an extremely steep learning curve even after going through the full tutorial.

I started off importing my current manuscript in as separate scenes since that seemed like a cool feature. But after working with it for a while, I realized I do not ever want to work on just one scene, since the others must be referenced frequently to ensure I haven’t missed a detail when adding the next scene. I need to see a lot of text while writing, not just small pieces.

The text formatting is quite frustrating. I feel like I’m just constantly fighting with it to format text the way I want, and may have to leave it alone until it’s done because I’m wasting too much time trying to get it to work right. One of the biggest difficulties is, Scrivener does not apply formatting to a blank line, only if there’s a character present. For instance, several bullets of text, highlight them all to change the font size, it doesn’t stick unless you add a space to each bullet. The formatting should be independent of text as part of the paragraph so it sticks when you make a change.

I wish there was a way to automatically link to character/location files when they come up in the text. I assumed this was the case from perusing the web site before bying. I didn’t suspect when I bought the software that I would have to manually edit every reference of a character or location to hyperlink to it. So, I’ve added a chapter header document (excluded from compile) that includes a list of all characters/locations in the chapter with links from there. It’s manual, and thus time consuming.

A lot of the “stuff” Scrivener does wastes my time when I would rather be writing. A couple times I have nearly quit and switched back to Word.

Fyi, I’m working on a 135k novel and a 2nd one currently at 60k.

How do you see “a lot of text” using Word?

In Scrivener you can use the split screen view to open up a different scene or to look at two sections of the same screen simultaneously.

Leaving it alone sounds like the best option to me. What on earth are you doing that means you have to fiddle with the formatting constantly?

Working on a bunch of novels none of which are below 60K. I could not have got beyond 6K without Scrivener and all its features.

Have you considered using the Search function for this?

You can also use keywords to tag documents with characters, locations, and so on, and then search on the keyword.

Katherine

Scrivenings mode may help. If you choose the scenes you want to see right now and select Scrivenings mode (Command-1 from the binder, or look for it in the toolbar or the View menu), you can edit the selected scenes as though they’re a single document.

If you type two square brackets ([[), then type your character or location name and close the brackets (]]), Scriv will give you a link to an internal document with that word as a title. For example, [[London]] would appear as a link to a location document titled London.

Agreed, the Scrivenings view mode is really integral to the concept of working in smaller pieces. It doesn’t really matter one bit if your chapter is comprised of several hundred fragments of text, if you can work on them together in a text editor as though there were all one file. Of course the nice thing about Scrivener is that these pieces being components of a chapter is only one way to look at them. You can search for scenes that contain the word “London” and then edit the search results as a singular text file, or pull out all scenes from one PoV to check for continuity regardless of how much actual book content is in between these scenes. You’re really working with variable segments of text that can be fit together into a longer document—either while you work or when you compile.

The point being, the software is designed to work around the concept that text has an internal thematic, narrative or topical structure, and that this structure may not resemeble the sort of structure a reader sees (a chapter break, a scene divider, etc.), so the tools are designed to give you that personal outline that goes as detailed as you need it to be and no more. If the smallest useful chunk of text to you is a chapter that is fine, that is even represented in the options of this poll—just know the program is designed from the ground up to not be limited by constructs such as these. If you need to go deeper, you can.

It just means learning some new habits. Scrivener works like most Mac software does, seeing as how it uses the basic Mac text engine. If you are used to something like Word or LibreOffice, which are ported programs that do their own thing entirely, some habits will need to change. Formatting paragraphs after you type is one thing I’ve learned to do over the years, and in my experience it involves no more effort to do that.

As said above, another thing to consider is that Scrivener isn’t the kind of program where you always have to worry about formatting to perfection while you write, in fact one of its goals is to make that concept as irrelevant as possible. There are exceptions of course, but for a typical novel you can probably have the compiler clean up every single paragraph for you, even if you wrote the book in fifteen different fonts and a mishmash of paragraphs styles. The idea here is that you can write comfortably, rather than to spec. Let machines handle the busywork, that is what they are really good at.

That is one of my favourite features, but you do need to ask for it as it is off by default. The setting is in the Corrections preference pane, lower half. This feature also lets you create new items, by typing in a phrase that isn’t an item title yet. One last tip, since we are working with Binder item titles with this feature, the Edit/Complete Document Title command (Ctrl-Esc) can come in really handy.

Is this ([[) (]]) feature available in the windows version? I don’t really see it anywhere, but am already a little obsessed with its potential.

Thanks.

Alas, not yet. It really is a nice feature if the way you take notes and develop text is more akin to a wiki, so we do intend to bring it to Windows. There is another tool that is not quite as seamless (it won’t automatically link up to the first document in the binder with a matching name), but there should be a keyboard shortcut on the Edit/Scrivener Link/New Links… menu command which basically does the same thing. If you used the brackets on the Mac to make a new document, that’s the dialogue box you’d get after using it. So for hot-linking to new blank pages that should help fill the gap until we can get the brackets in.

I’m putting together a collection of short stories and I’m not sure Scrivener is made for that. Still working on all the details, but it would be good to remember that no everyone is using Scrivener to just write novels (or papers or whatever.) BTW, I have the Windows version and am SOOOO looking forward to an update!

I disagree any and every writing activity beyond a single sentence is amenable to use of Scrivener. And even that sentence, if more than “Hello world!”, may require the use of Split/Merge document, Move to ensure that its phrases and phrasing is optimal. Anything more that typo correction is a Scrivenerable task; and if there are structural alterations (moving paragraphs/documents around within the manscript) then Scrivener is an absolute must!

Perhaps the only writing that Scrivener would be wasted on is collating a grocery shopping list — and even that might require Sort paragraph, Move etc to put the items into the appropriate order.

As to short story collections the novel templates (with and without parts) would work. Treat the stories as “chapters” and then mess with the Compile settings to tweak the output.

I replaced MS Word with Scrivener during its first Beta in 2006, and since have used it exclusively for everything, from dust-jacket blurbs to magazine columns and travel pieces to a 340-page collection of essays due out in October. During that time-frame I also edited seven issues a year of a 160-page magazine, managing every aspect from reading, rejecting, accepting, filing, managing, and editing submissions to back-and-forthing with authors to outputting the final files to the InDesign operatives in Production.

The only limitations to Scrivener in my experience are self-imposed.

If this were Facebook I’d Like your post. I too have replaced other writing tools (LibreOffice, Apple Pages) with Scrivener for my writing. There are occasions when I do still use toilet-paper paradigmed word processors but only when other people send me documents for a quick review.