After getting Scrivener registered, here’s what I suggest… go and do two searches on the internet.
- Free Scrivener templates
Free name files for Scrivener
You’ll find some of both. You’ll also find someone who’s charging for his templates. Okay, I guess, but most of us prefer our templates to be USED. The “Free name files for Scrivener” search will yield a gentleman who spent a LOT of valuable time compiling more name lists for Scrivener. You want those. Install those on a day when you’re doing something. Some name files take up to 30 minutes to install.
Now, you want to start a Scrivener project. I’ve learned from one man, who suggests using the fiction templates even for non-fiction! Well! That’s actually a really great idea!
Try a project from each template. Save your first project to Dropbox. The rest after that should automatically try to save to Dropbox. (important – you don’t want your computer to crash and lose EVERYTHING!) The template I like the most is actually not even mine – it’s the 30 chapter template! That one has great info on how to set up your novel’s pacing, and it showed me where my first novel was broken! I may contact the author, and ask if I can import his headers (or variations of them) into my setup.
Try one of each. See which one you like best.
Next, I like to go to the View menu, and add icon color to… almost everything. I don’t like it in the outliner. Aside from that, I like it colorful. It inspires me. Although when I’m writing a longer scene, I’ll often go to full screen mode.
Backups
This part’s pretty easy to do. Under the file-backup menu, you’ll see “back up to…”. Choose that. Go to Dropbox, and create a folder called “Scrivener Backups”. Set ALL of your projects to back up to that directory. They’ll create a zip file of your project to use in case something goes wrong.
Now, you’re ready to start writing!
But first…
Images
Create a folder in your My Documents – pictures for stories. You can’t directly save any images you need for your novels into Scrivener. They have to be imported from a folder INTO your story. Not the best way to do it, but okay. Some people apparently like to have an image on the fullscreen mode.
I do in one novel, don’t in the rest. In my character profiles, I do import pictures for some characters. Well, only one. But it was important. And I have images for the locations. Yes, you want to fill all that out!
But we’ll talk about that more in the planning section.
