Lanna Michaels (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lannamichaels) wrote2020-09-09 04:26 pm
lannamichaels) wrote2020-09-09 04:26 pm
Entry tags:
Scrivener as it is used
I was so so so sure I'd started a How I Use Scrivener post, but I'm fucked if I can find it. However, I know I've promised this to folks in the past and I've done various off-the-cuff attempts in comment sections.
So! How I Use Scrivener, an excellent writing program that changed the way I write fic.
- At its most basic, Scrivener is a program that lets you organize and arrange a bunch of documents. This is useful for writing because you can have your draft and your research notes and all that in one place. The biggest selling point as far as I'm concerned? You can very easily back it up to a .zip file. All your stuff in one place!
- The way I have this set up for fic is, I have one Scrivener file for all my fic. When I was still poking around it, I made scrivener projects for each fic, that didn't last. Everything is in one file. I also have a scrivener file for some non-fic organizational stuff; it's great for keepings things organized, and it saves as .rtf so it's very portable.
- I organize in folders. Since 2018, everything (except bingo cards) that I start in a year goes into the "started in 2018/2019/2020" folder. Before that, it's not well-organized by when it was started and it's a bit of a mess. This is my own fault for leaving those fics languishing unfinished :P
Every so often, I version off a fic. I'll duplicate the fic's document, either accept the auto-numbering of "-1" on the end or change to a different number, and then move the duplicate to a "previous versions" folder. I pretty much never actually look at those previous versions, but they're there if I need them.
Whenever I finish a fic, it gets moved to "finished".
I also have folders for larger universes, such as liegelord and multitudes, to keep them organized. - Bingo cards: this is a great use of folders, which show as cork boards when you click on them. I create a document for each square of the bingo card, and it's arranged as 5x5 like a card is (you can adjust how many columns, but I think mine was 5x5 by default and I never changed it). With it laid out, I can figure out my approach. I can note on the corkboard view with comments or "x" to show that it was finished, and I can write each fic in the bingo card folder.
As an example, here's my 2018 Trope Bingo card in Scrivener (click for larger):
- There are a lot of features in Scrivener I don't touch. My main ones are:
-backup to zip every time I close the program
-autosave autosave autosave. In all the years of using Scrivener, I think it has only lost things twice in computer issues. Which is miraculous, frankly.
-every time I start a new fic, it's all formatted exactly how I like it, I don't have to mess with anything - Some tricks:
-to set the default font and spacing, that's in options -> editor, but you may need to click in the little preview to get things like font.
-your custom dictionary is in your appdata and is called wordslist.ini . If you switch computers or whatever, you can just drop that into appdata and have your custom dictionary and not have to keep teaching scrivener words you've already taught it. (Windows) - Among other great things? It's a text editor. It doesn't fuck up anything by thinking it's smarter than me. This is priceless. I write my fic in there. I put in html tags as I write. I copy it into Dreamwidth and AO3. I never have to think about it.
Seriously, I set up my settings in, what, 2011? 2012? I have never touched them again. It all Just Works. - One downside: Scrivener and Word's paste-values shortcuts are different and I notice this every time I fuck it up. *sigh* (it's possible I could adjust this in Scrivener. It doesn't bother me enough that I've ever looked. When I fail in Word, nothing happens, and when I fail in Scrivener, I get a capital V.)
- But! Scrivener has text-transform like you'd like; I'm very used to using ctrl-6 now to convert to Capitalize Every Word.
- It's also got a Random Name Generator built-in.
- Other things: you can split the view so you can see two parts of the same document at once, or see two documents at once. You can add hyperlinks between documents. I have literally never done anything more complicated than that in all my years of using this program, because my needs are pretty simple. If you do scripts, though, I know there's a bunch of stuff for that.
- I use Scrivener for Windows. I know the Mac version has stuff Windows doesn't have yet. Apparently Mac will let you just show the dialogue? I look forward to getting that in Windows, that'd be so great.
- What a document looks like in the way I have Scrivener set up (click for larger):
(a fic in scrivener; the fic in question is Fool-Proof)
The bottom of the screen has word count and character count, as well as the zoom. As you can see, I have my defaults set to Times New Roman 12pt at 130% zoom.
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i've been using scrivener for roughly 10 months and the thing i've used the most is the split-view thing bc im a serial rewriter kjfghdfgkh it's pretty great.
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...I feel like I'm in the same situation as you but don't see it as a problem? My scrivener project has 560 backed up zip files. I suppose if they were taking up too much space, I could delete some, but it's not been an issue. But I've only got one .scriv. Are you saving over the .scriv with new names?
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I want to find all the most recent/changed versions of each file regardless of what .scriv they're in, but at some point I started accidentally making nested backups so I have literally dozens of copies of some of them and no record of which are important or oldest.
('Badly organized' was the relevant descriptor there.)
With my other types of files in that mess I just ran CloneSpy to find file duplicates and deleted the ones I didn't need, but I'm afraid that would mess things up with scriv projects, if it even worked. Unless I completely disassembled the .scriv files, got rid of the duplicate rtfs, and started over, but that loses all the extra organization in the project files.
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hmmm.... could you dump them all in one location as subfolders, then search on that parent folder for each .rtf by name, and sort by date last modified? Then you could open that rtf and copy into a new scriv or whichever you're going to use from now on. I'm pretty sure this will work with never-zipped folders, I don't know how well it keeps the date modified when you unzip a backup. And even this would only work if you started with one canonical file that had all the documents so the rtf numbers will be the same across all scrivs.
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The actual answer here is to use you method of keeping backups, but every time I get it all organized something happens to make me change my workflow and it all goes out of control again. ¯\_(ツ)_/
I've been hoping there's some secret version control trick everyone else know, but I will probably just have to su k it up and deal w my own mess.
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the only thing I can think of, but which would take so much time, would be to open each version of the file, paste it into gdocs, and then use the version history to compare across to see which versions are the same and which are significantly different.
but yes I agree I also wish the rtfs had better names. I understand why they don't, but, like, the one I spent a lot of time editing today is apparently 1645. That's not a helpful name! :P Also I have no idea how to be inside scrivener and find out which file goes to which fic. There's probably a way. I don't know what it is and couldn't find it the time I tried.
...you could MAYBE try searching on a unique phrase from each fic, which could bring up all the different rtfs that contain it?
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I like folders too. I tend to put similar stories in one Scriv file, like a series in one or a ship in one. As long as anything in the file is a WIP, it’s on my active list but when it’s all done (as in a series is finished), I move it into the AO3 folder.
I think the feature I like the most is the organizing and having the research saved in the same file. And autosaving, holy shit yes.
Hmmm... now I’m thinking about writing my own Scrivener post. 🤔
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Yay! I'm glad it helped :D
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Glad it's helpful! The individual files aren't a single document, that's just the backup zip. For example, the directory on my computer for the scrivener file I do all my writing in has three main folders: Files, Settings, and Snapshots. Inside the Files folder are subfolders Docs and ProjectNotes. And inside Docs are all the rtf files. I can open each one individually if I like. It's just that the naming on them is useless: what's in "1991.rtf"? No idea, I'd have to open it to find out. But since it's an rtf, I can open it individually in a bunch of different programs. But to find out what it's called in Scrivener, I'd have to open the scrivener file and see that I'd named that document "90s exchange sequel". But since there is a directory, I could also sort it by creation date or modified date, so if I wanted to just grab the last 5 files I'd worked on, and not open Scrivener, I could also do that.