{"id":885,"date":"2012-02-29T15:00:56","date_gmt":"2012-02-29T21:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/?p=885"},"modified":"2012-02-28T21:43:58","modified_gmt":"2012-02-29T03:43:58","slug":"scrivener-the-outliner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/29\/scrivener-the-outliner\/","title":{"rendered":"Scrivener: The Outliner"},"content":{"rendered":"

I might have gone just a wee bit evangelistic about Scrivener<\/a> at my writing group last night. I’ll try to rein it in a bit here. (But Scrivener is awesome. You should try it if you haven’t yet.)<\/p>\n

I’ve been meaning to blog about how I use Scrivener, and have decided to break it down into little pieces. Today, the Outliner<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\"Scrivener<\/a><\/p>\n

I really only started using the Outliner recently, and I don’t use it for actually making an outline. I use it for keeping an eye on my progress and to some extent, structure.<\/p>\n

The left-hand column lists my scenes. (These are not my real scene titles…or are they?) If I had written a synopsis, it would show below the scene title. I usually turn that off, though, because my synopses get long. <\/p>\n

Point of view is a custom column that I added to keep track of whose scene it is. After I took the screenshot I added one for “Day”, i.e., when the scene takes place, because that is a pain to keep track of. “Location” might be another good one to add.<\/p>\n

Label and status are sort of self-explanatory. They’re both customizable, so I use labels, which get color-coded, for things like “Questions”, “Changes needed”, “Don’t forget to follow up on this”, “Wow, you really screwed up here” etc. Statuses help me keep track of revisions and whether something’s been to my crit group or not. <\/p>\n

I’m playing with Scrivener’s word count tracking for the first time, so I get multicolored progress bars. I told the program I want each of my scenes to be 1000 words long, and this is a nice visual reminder of what needs to be worked on (I usually write in order, but with the two different protagonists I skipped ahead to Juliet’s second chapter before going back to Romeo’s first). Or of what might be a rather weak scene–for me at least, a short scene usually means it isn’t pulling its weight.<\/p>\n

The date columns are there by default and I haven’t got around to deleting them yet.<\/p>\n

I’ve also been using Scrivener at work for various content projects (when I’m not sitting at the keyboard at home typing words, I’m sitting at the keyboard at work typing different words). That’s where I started using the Outliner, since for larger projects it provides an at-a-glance look at content status (to write, waiting for approval, in implementation, etc.) and location (whether the content for that page\/email\/whatever is in this Scrivener file, or on a mockup, or on the server). And as I type this it just occurred to me that Due Date would be a good column for me to add to some projects… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I might have gone just a wee bit evangelistic about Scrivener at my writing group last night. I’ll try to rein it in a bit here. (But Scrivener is awesome. You should try it if you haven’t yet.) I’ve been … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}