The title sums it up – no lengthy intro here! Just research your novel with Evernote and store the results in Scrivener. Where? In the research section of course.
Evernote
Evernote is the primo note collecting tool. For everyone who says, “I just need a program to store and collect all my notes on various things, license plate number etc” – the answer is Evernote. Evernote has expanded capabilities to allow you to store all your hundreds of PDF documents, notes, to do lists, school achievements, etc. Collecting the information is just as easy – you can email or text the information to yourself, or you can use the Evernote Clipper to capture the information.
I use the clipper to capture information. I must clip almost all my notes, judging from Evernote’s appearance on my computer. Constantly reading and clipping pages.
Once you clip a page, your first prompt is to add it to a notebook. You can store things to a default notebook, but be aware this requires frequent “Admin days”, where you go through Evernote and add tags, change notebooks, etc. The beauty of it is that as your needs change, you can go back and re-tag every note or clipping you’ve done. You also can change the notebooks to suit changing needs.
Scrivener
I like to copy information straight to Scrivener once I have it tagged. You can do it two ways – highlight your note in Evernote, CTRL+C to copy, then go to a document in the Research folder in Scrivener for your book project and add the notes there. I personally would love to see multi-project integration in Scrivener so that all your research for all projects is available – kind of like the Scratch pad, or the “future writing projects” tool in WriteWay Professional.
Scrivener does not yet support tagging, and that’s something that would make a plus if this kind of multi-project functionality was added.
Images, video and text can be stored in the Research folder. I haven’t tried storing any video in Scrivener yet, but that’s coming – I’ll give it a try soon.
Conclusion
Writing a novel can entail collecting a lot of research – and Scrivener remains your place of primary importance to store it. Don’t neglect Evernote as your front end for collecting and categorizing your research!
