Talking to a lot of writers, I’m amazed how few use Scrivener! Of those that do, I’ve found few of them know about the little hacks within the program that save you a lot of writing time! When I first got Scrivener, I decided to learn as much as I could about it. I got the demo, and downloaded the tutorial videos. I put a lot of the tools into practice, and was surprised how quickly I was able to write once I put these tweaks into place!
Collections
Have you ever read one of your chapters, and had a character say they were twenty two, then in the next chapter they’re twenty six? It’s hard to keep track, unless you’re writing notes. One of the first tricks is to enable collections.
You can set up collections by character, date, and location – Let’s say you needed to keep track of everything that took place in a castle, or a cemetery. All you have to do is right click on the first scene, and choose “Add to collection>New Collection”.
Collections are now enabled. I almost always use collections just for characters, and I set one up for every major character. An added bonus is you can color code them. Now just add each scene to the appropriate collection (yes, a scene can belong to multiple collections). Doing this, you can now add an extra step to your edit phase – going through each collection and making sure you’ve kept all your facts straight, answered every question and fulfilled every promise of your novel!
This may seem like it adds more work, but in the long run it cuts down the searches of “where did I put that part?” This was crucial during my Star Trek novel. Believe it or not, I was just trying to answer the question of “What was the name of Barrett’s star ship?” The answer came after only ten minutes of going through collections – I’d neglected to name her ship.
Keywords
Keywords to me are huge. Enabling keywords allows you to see at a glance where a scene is through color coding – or who’s present in a scene. As you fill out the keywords, and then add them in the inspector window in every scene, the index cards on the corkboard begin to add the colors along the edge of the card. I keep my keywords icon on my taskbar.
Custom Meta Tags
You can add custom meta tags to Scrivener. Why is this important? When you go to Scrivenings view, you can see at a glance when a scene takes place, where it is, who’s in the scene, whose pov, and what items are in the scene. All you have to do is create the custom meta tags under the project menu, and then right click on the triangle at the top of the scroll bar in Scrivenings view.
When you go to Scrivenings view, you’ll be able to orient yourself quickly – Crucial if you put the book aside for a couple of months to work on something else!
This also allows you to track items, and that can save a huge amount of time writing! The Lord Of The Rings could have been written this way, as you had to track Shadowfax, the ring, the palantir, Sting, Frodo’s Chain mail shirt, Aragorn’s broken sword, and even the elvenstones!
Conclusion
You can successfully write a book without these tools and tips. However, these tricks save you COUNTLESS time during the writing process, and help keep you straight during the edit process. And if your book is complicated, these tools will keep it from becoming a mess! This alone can cause your novel to be rejected, and any tweak or hack that keeps your book from being rejected is worth it!
