I tend to work with monolithic documents rather than breaking them up into smaller documents of hundreds or a few thousand words. Three of my projects have outlines/journals in excess of 20k words. That will easily grow to 30k+. The individual draft documents for these projects, even if broken up, could top 50k per. In order to get from the top of the document to the bottom, you must swipe continuosly for quite awhile.
Apple Pages uses a system by which a long press along the right edge of the screen pulls up a pager. Thus:
To get to the top or bottom of a long document sans laborious scrolling, you can add Go To Start and Go To End icons to the extended keyboard and use them instead.
Scrivener is of course designed for long form writing. I don’t think people are buying Scrivener to draft Twitter posts.
Seriously though, I realize that Scrivener doesn’t think in pages unless compiling, but you could still page through by chunks, or screen views. Something. This one seems like a necessity.
If there is sufficient demand and a feasible solution, I guess Keith might well code such a feature into Scrivener for iOS.
Assume most people work in smaller chunks than you do.
You could search for specific words (if you can remember words around the point you are looking for), or you could add a meaningless tag every so often as a search anchor, such as AA888ZZ. When compiling, the repeated tag could be removed as a replacement, but in the meantime it could be used to jump through sections of a single long file.
I wrote a Twitter marketing campaign for an internationally renowned British author, and I used Scrivener for that (simple way to count the characters and to sort and reorder all the different tweets into a cohesive whole), with each tweet given its own file.
Adding tags is a good idea. My brain only works in large chunks for some reason. When the book is broken up into small pieces, I can’t seem to get a handle on it. I guess it’s a psychological issue. I need that gestalt.
I really like the way Pages handles it. I guess it would be possible to organize the project in Scrivener — research, prewriting, character studies, etc. — and then write the actual draft in Pages, copying it over. Really wouldn’t be a bid deal.
We all have our needs and foibles. If it works for you, it works for you. That’s all that matters.
I used to be a long-chunk writer as well, but these days I use small blocks assembled seamlessly in scrivenings mode. Find it makes reorganising work so much easier. The old habit was hard to break.
