That's interesting - just writing without a place to put it or no one to read it is almost impossible, but writing in episodes gets unwieldy. So a bit of both is the answer ( I hope ) - write a big chunk then turn it into episodes & carry on...(?)
I use Scrivener for my writing, and I learned Scrivener as I went along, which means it's quite a mess. I should have gone through all the tutorials first, and avoided a lot of confusing clean up that is still in work. Even now I'm tempted to create a new Scrivener project (again), and copy everything into it.
Nicely done, Simon. When I joined Substack, you became one of my first follows when I saw you were also a Scrivener user, so I had to view this.
I often use the outliner in Scrivener, which allows an overview of my novels, chapters, and scenes. The outliner includes a customizable set of fields such as synopsis, keywords, and status, which is where I can see the progression of a chapter from ToDo through published. (My book 1 status queued for Edit, then Publish.)
You said you couldn’t write without Scrivener and I agree. When I switched it was like turning on a light that allowed me to see my work.
Ooh, yes, let’s make this a trend. I should be editing but … My only wish for Scrivener is if you could do in folder or in scene searches instead of a global search throughout the whole thing (which is also handy, just not all the time!)
That is very cool. Thanks for the orientation, Simon. I've played a little with Scrivener, flip-flopping on various fiction and non-fiction ideas. A few questions:
One of the things you didn't mention that impressed me was that there's no subscription; it's a one-time payment, and it updates. SO cool compared to Evernote and Notion!
1. Do you keep it on your computer or an external hard drive, and how do you make backups? Have you ever encountered a glitch/save issue?
2. Now that I'm around 220 articles into Carer Mentor, and I've tons of other articles/research/concepts in Notion and Evernote - I'm on the cusp of merging it all - Have you ever imported files to Scrivener or do you copy-paste?
3. Do you hyperlink to different sections/episodes - I'd like to make something that's interlinked and dynamic and I'm worried the anchor links would break as the text grows. Thoughts?
I have manual backups to external hard drives of the project, and also have it synced to Google Drive so I can switch between machines and have an off-site backup. As long as I’m careful to let Drive finish syncing there’s no problem. I’ve had a couple of occasions when something has gone wrong, but Scrivener actually handles it quite elegantly: if it can’t figure out something due to a sync issue, it puts the files into a ‘recovered’ section and you can then manually restore.
I haven’t imported for ages. But it’s fairly easy to dump a whole manuscript and then chunk it up.
That's interesting - just writing without a place to put it or no one to read it is almost impossible, but writing in episodes gets unwieldy. So a bit of both is the answer ( I hope ) - write a big chunk then turn it into episodes & carry on...(?)
This was amazing and super helpful. Thank you for taking the time to give us a tour!
I use Scrivener for my writing, and I learned Scrivener as I went along, which means it's quite a mess. I should have gone through all the tutorials first, and avoided a lot of confusing clean up that is still in work. Even now I'm tempted to create a new Scrivener project (again), and copy everything into it.
Nicely done, Simon. When I joined Substack, you became one of my first follows when I saw you were also a Scrivener user, so I had to view this.
I often use the outliner in Scrivener, which allows an overview of my novels, chapters, and scenes. The outliner includes a customizable set of fields such as synopsis, keywords, and status, which is where I can see the progression of a chapter from ToDo through published. (My book 1 status queued for Edit, then Publish.)
You said you couldn’t write without Scrivener and I agree. When I switched it was like turning on a light that allowed me to see my work.
Thanks for sharing.
Ooh, yes, let’s make this a trend. I should be editing but … My only wish for Scrivener is if you could do in folder or in scene searches instead of a global search throughout the whole thing (which is also handy, just not all the time!)
I think you can hit Ctrl+F to do a local search, which might be what you’re after.
Yes!!! And here I’ve been using the search button at the top!
That is very cool. Thanks for the orientation, Simon. I've played a little with Scrivener, flip-flopping on various fiction and non-fiction ideas. A few questions:
One of the things you didn't mention that impressed me was that there's no subscription; it's a one-time payment, and it updates. SO cool compared to Evernote and Notion!
1. Do you keep it on your computer or an external hard drive, and how do you make backups? Have you ever encountered a glitch/save issue?
2. Now that I'm around 220 articles into Carer Mentor, and I've tons of other articles/research/concepts in Notion and Evernote - I'm on the cusp of merging it all - Have you ever imported files to Scrivener or do you copy-paste?
3. Do you hyperlink to different sections/episodes - I'd like to make something that's interlinked and dynamic and I'm worried the anchor links would break as the text grows. Thoughts?
Yeah, the lack of subscription is brilliant.
I have manual backups to external hard drives of the project, and also have it synced to Google Drive so I can switch between machines and have an off-site backup. As long as I’m careful to let Drive finish syncing there’s no problem. I’ve had a couple of occasions when something has gone wrong, but Scrivener actually handles it quite elegantly: if it can’t figure out something due to a sync issue, it puts the files into a ‘recovered’ section and you can then manually restore.
I haven’t imported for ages. But it’s fairly easy to dump a whole manuscript and then chunk it up.
Thanks for this, Simon. I'm glad to hear about the 'recovered' section.