Organizing your Binder
Remember-
Remember to organize as you go or you will never do it or delay dramatically. If labeled and organized, then you can come back later to compact and redo, but the process will be infinitely easier.
Organizing Principals
A. Give your information a logical home and tag with labels, keywords and other metadata to make your information easy to find.
B. Name characters, locations, scenes as you write, ie now. You can always change later, but rough things in as you go, DON’T plan to do this later as later often never happens and you’re left with an unorganized mess.
C. Never permanently delete scenes, they may prove useful later, save discarded work in a Scraps folder outside of your trash folder to avoid accidental deletion. By saving in a folder outside of your trash folder, you must actively send the folder to the trash AND then take a second step to empty the trash folder. (which is permanent)
D. When you have the Binder organized the way you want, as well as metadata, and layout settings, consider saving this as a Project Template to use in the future. (A detailed blog on creating custom Project Templates has been posted on this site.)
Consider Creating a Custom Project Template:
How you use Scrivener will always be an evolving process as you learn the program and alter strategies to get the most out of Scrivener. You can easily create Project templates when you create something useful for writing a novel and want this to start all new novel projects. The easiest way to do this is to:
1. Save a current project that is organized the way you want by using the save as function. (File > Save as)
2. Then name this New Novel template (or your choice). This is now separate from your current project and can be changed without affecting the old project.
3. Keep any useful document templates for characters, locations, scene development, or world building that you currently use. Here is a good time to create a Chapter template. Include multiple blank scenes with targets set for your writing, add notes you find useful when first creating scenes. With a chapter template it becomes easy to create a whole novel ready to fill with a new story.
4. Keep Front and Back matter folders, perhaps including a dedication, or author biography that can be reused.
5. Save any metadata (keywords, labels, status, icons that you find useful)
6. Keep the folders you find useful and strip out any useless information.
7. Save styles you like as well.
Suggestions for Binder folders outside of the manuscript folder.
Notes folder for miscellaneous ideas you have before starting or occur during the writing or editing process. You may include subfolders for Ideas for the story climax, timeline, foreshadowing, loose random thoughts, brainstorming, or potential future scenes list with notes.
Problems Folder for plot issues, romance problems, pacing issues, areas that need work, or editing issues.
Theme Folder where you can place your themes that you are trying to convey in your story, overall and for individual characters.
Pertinent and Homeless A folder for any pertinent information that doesn’t have an obvious home somewhere else in my outline notes. You could assign them a project wide color for this folder and anywhere they appear in the project. For example, could use orange and highlight any notes in the project that fit this category in orange. Inspector Notes can have sections highlighted to make them stand out. Thus, these thoughts/data/information are now highlighted in orange wherever they appear. They get their own folder in the Research section as well.
Overused Words a list of words to monitor of those that each writer tends to use as they write. (Crutch words, overused phrases or descriptions) Keeping a list here will remind you when editing to search for these words to prevent overuse. This list can be used as a basis for regex searches to scour your novel for these offending words. Save this list and use from project to project to spot and correct your tendencies. You can also use Scrivener’s writing tools with links to find alternative words to replace the offending ones. Keeping a list of the overused words and possible substitutes can be reused in the future.
Common Fails would be a list of common issues you correct in your novels. Examples might include not enough sensory details, overlong paragraphs, not identifying dialog characters often enough to reorient readers, or not orienting reader to POV and location of scenes quickly enough. These could be included in the Inspector Notes of Scene templates to remind you of this during a first draft or subsequent edits.
Dragon Substitutions- This is only useful for people who dictate. Some words (especially fantasy names, locations, but also certain other words cause consistent errors when dictating.) An option is to create a list of substitute words to replace these words. I use double words such as ningning for the fantasy name Ning, or popular fictional characters, greek philosphers, or italian painters. (ie names that will not otherwise be used in my story) to substitute for locations or characters whose names cause consistent dictation errors.
Scraps folder for currently deleted scenes, or scenes removed during editing. This can be placed in the trash as well, but with a simple mistake, you can permanently delete valuable information when emptying the trash folder. However, if you keep a Scraps folder outside of the manuscript (for example in the Research section), then it will require two steps to permanently delete these scraps. Step one will require you to deliberately move your folder to the trash, and step two would requiring emptying the trash. This is much harder to do by accident. (Philosophically you do not want to throw away any files. The size is relatively small when it's only writing involved. These scraps could come in handy if you write more books in a series. Inevitably, you will find that you will come up with something that you deleted and need that information. It's much easier to keep it in a discard folder and never get rid of it.)
Character Folder Consider google searches on names of places or characters to make sure will not encounter copy write issues. I find adding images here helps me visualize characters and locations. With the new AI image tools available you can get very specific images to reflect your vision for your characters or locations with surprising ease.
Location Folder (see above)
Theme Folder Here you would put the overall themes of your novel.
Images Folder Here is where I can keep character images, google search pictures, Pinterest images, building images, cover concepts, maps, crude sketches. You can minimize project size smaller by externally linking to these images. Using a computer folder to store these materials with the links embedded in this folder. (I usually place this in the Research folder)
Flashback/Backstory Folder Here, you could keep a list of Flashbacks or use keywords to locate them in your project. Here you could keep details of a character/world’s backup and add as the need arises or your imagination creates. Keywords are a great way to track which scenes contain either or both.
World Building Folder (May mean very different things depending on what you are writing.) You may want subfolders for information for varying aspects such as: symbolism, religious beliefs, political structures, social aspects, family structure, customs, scarce resources, or conflict ideas (Romance,Rivals,Antagonist,Nature)in your story .
Timeline Folder- Here you have a document with your timeline for your novel with a listing of key dates and explanations. This can be viewed or searched for with custom metadata. You may use Custom metadata attached to scenes to display dates in the outline view or included with plotting. Dates and time can be included in the Synopsis section as well and will be displayed on Index cards when use the Corkboard view. In the outliner a custom timeline will sort by the year only. You can include month and day information in the text of the custom timeline, but the Outliner will not sort based on this. You can also attach keywords based on key story events, years as another way to organize your novel timeline. Keywords could also be associated with crucial years, months, days, or events allowing you to quickly find the scenes associated with certain dates. You could even create collections this way of scenes associated with certain key events in your timeline. Keep a timeline document, a custom metadata key, and a list of keywords associated with events in this folder.
The date is visible in the Synopsis.
If you use custom metadata can do by several formats including just date or date and time if that is crucial to your story. You can do this as free form text as well. This can become a column in the Outliner and arranged in chronological order. Do this in Project Settings.
Plotting- This tends to be more important to plotters than pantsers. I start with a summary of the story. Usually, this is something I wrote long ago, when the story idea first solidified for me. I stick this in a document at the top of the Binder, so I can refer to it to keep me on track throughout the outlining process. Plus, it’s just fun to get to put some words in the file right from the start. However, it may help to have an outline of your plot based on a known plot structure such as the Hero’s Journey, or Save the Cat. I have used Scapple (a mind map software from Scrivener) to set up a template with these points and columns for the POV characters that helps me create a rich framework to build my story on. Below is an example of Act I in STC with bullet point summaries of points that occur in act one with boxes to fill in for multiple Pov’s This allows you to see the whole plot structure from a macro level and information from scapple can be dragged into Scrivener and placed in Inspector Notes for the scene to help write it. (This is just one way Scrivener can be used.)
Draft Folder- you have options of duplicating the whole draft folder between stages of writing and editing. Each whole draft folder can be saved as a duplicate and placed here. Label Draft and add letter D-1, D-2, etc.
Steps to create multiple draft folders.
A. Just select the whole draft manuscript by clicking on first scene/chapter and holding shift key and clicking on last.
B. This will highlight the manuscript and wait for the Scrivening view to be finished with the total word count.
C. Right click inside the highlighted files and choose duplicate.
D. The result will be the manuscript files appearing below the current manuscript with the same names a hyphen and a 1.
E. Now create a new Draft folder under the Research folder and name it D1 for first draft and drag files inside of this.
F. Repeat as you create different draft versions. These files as RTF files should be relatively small.
Adding a number allows you to order these versions of the Draft correctly.
Template Folder- Any file can be turned into a template to be used over and over again. Such as character templates, plotting templates, worldbuilding, editing checklists, and even a chapter/scene template with a chapter with scenes with targets for each scene and note checklists to evaluate scene development. A chapter and scene template can be rapidily duplicated to create a novel template from a blank project.
Consider adding blank scenes if feel need major rewrite of a current scene and pull in parts you like and this forces you to focus on scene structure.
Right clicking on any binder item brings up the option to Add items (below the current file) such as a -
New Text
New Folder
A (document) Template (you will see all your current templates here to choose)
Scenes Folder in Research- Consider in trilogies or connected works to have a research folder Called other book scenes. When writing books in a series you may want to keep a folder of relevant scenes from a previous book or local to pull details from and maintain consistency. Or serve as a fresh reminder of a key scene from a previous book. This way you do not have to open the other project and can have this available at your fingertips. Drag into new project in this special folder and drag from there into document bookmarks. Could use different icons to represent books in the series so would be easy to know where scene is from, though could add more info in title.
Again, as with all the blogs in this series, these are suggestions that I have found helpful and you can use these or add your own. Please contact with different ideas you have used with success.