Sorry you’re finding it heavy. I certainly sympathise; the tutorial covers a lot of ground – much more than you need to get writing. I’d almost recommend doing the tutorial after you’ve been using Scrivener for a little while.
There are some basic principles underpinning Scrivener that help explain why it does what it does, and therefore how to use it.
- It’s not a WYSIWYG editor. The fundamental principle is to write in whatever format looks good to you, and worry about formatting to suit a reader later. Writing and Compiling are therefore two completely different things.
- It’s not a linear editor. Scrivener is about flexibility in the structure, so you don’t have to start with “Prologue: It was a dark and stormy night…” and keep going until you get to “… and they all lived happily every after. The END”. You can do that if you want, but you can write your document in what ever order you like, growing it organically.
What does that mean?
It means that your first job is to focus on the tools you need to structure and write your work.
Those tools are:
- The Binder
- The Editor
The Binder is the thing on the left hand side that looks a bit like a file management system. That’s because that’s exactly what it is. It has three main repositories: The Draft / Manuscript is exactly that. Put your actual writing in there. The Research folder is for notes and other things that won’t actually form part of your book. The Trash is self explanatory.
You can put file and folders in the Binder using the buttons at the top of the screen, and move them around with clicks and drags. When you later come to Compile, you;ll find that Scrivener treats files and folders slightly differently (or more accurately, let’s you treat them differently if you want). In the meantime, a suggested start point is to use Folders to organise your manuscript into Parts and Chapters, and then fill those with documents that represent individual scenes.
You don’t need to work like that (some people have 1 document per paragraph, some 1 per chapter… it’s personal preference) but 1 doc per scene seems to work for a lot of people.
The Editor is the main part of the screen. That’s simply where you write your manuscript. Click on the file / folder in the Binder that you’re writing about to select that document in the Editor, and then start writing!
Now comes the complicated bit… The Editor has FOUR different ways of showing you your draft, but only three buttons to press to get you there. These are the three grouped buttons in the middle at the top of the screen that look like a stack of pages, a corkboard with 2 cards pinned to it, and an icon that looks a bit like the binder.
- The far right button (that looks like the binder) is the Outliner mode - it shows your draft in tabular form… this is just the data for each file (probably pretty sparse at this point!)
- The middle button (that looks like a corkboard) is the Corkboard mode - this allows you to view the selected documents in the binder as index cards on a corkboard. If you have a folder selected in the Binder, it’ll have a card for every document in that folder. You can use these cards to store a brief synopsis (which is also viewable in the Inspector pane – the panel on the right of the screen – for the active document).
- The far right button (that looks like three sheets of paper) is Scrivenings mode - this shows you the actual text in all the selected documents in the Binder. So if you’ve selected the Folder in the Binder called “Chapter two”, it’ll show you all the text (and allow you to edit it) for all the documents / scenes from the Chapter two folder, separated by a line.
- If you have no button pressed, you’re in normal edit mode… you just see (and can edit) the text for the document that is selected in the Binder.
If you can’t see the Binder or the Inspector, you can make them visible or hidden by pressing the buttons at the far left and the far right of the toolbar.
The other thing you probably want to know to get started is how to import work you’ve already started. By far the easiest way is to simple drag the file from your hard drive into the Binder and press OK to the pop-ups. You can then scroll through the document to the start of scenes / chapters etc and press Ctrl-K. That’ll split the document into two at the cursor point. You can then rename and move those around in your binder to structure your work.
Play around with that for a while, getting comfortable though experimentation on how the Binder and Editor work. Being familiar with that will make the Compile process much more intuitive as well (as this is essentially a way of telling Scrivener which documents from the Binder to include in the compiled draft, and how to format each section).
Then you can slowly start to think about other things, like Labels, Statuses and Keywords to track development / characters. And later you can look into setting word count targets or things like Collections.
If you’d like a “real” Scrivener project to play with, you can download one from this page: viewtopic.php?f=51&t=28587
(It’ll have more in it than you’ll need, but will give you a whole bunch of stuff you can play with).