New Scrivener post on searching is up at WU
My latest Scrivener post—covering several ways to search your project in Scrivener 3—is up at WriterUnboxed.com today. I hope you’ll stop by to check it out and ask me your Scrivener questions. Cheers!
My latest Scrivener post—covering several ways to search your project in Scrivener 3—is up at WriterUnboxed.com today. I hope you’ll stop by to check it out and ask me your Scrivener questions. Cheers!
I’m trying to finish up book three in my Men of Steele series, and I can see why so many authors swear by a series bible. In case you haven't heard the term before, a series bible is a collection of key details about everything and everyone in the world of your series, from the characters’ eye colors, birthdates, and the cars they drive, to their family history, the name of pertinent streets, and the timeline for major and minor events (current and backstory).
While I keep track of a lot of information for main, secondary, and even minor characters in the Project Notes section of each book, lately I’ve been having to refer back to previous books to look for all kinds of things: thoughts about one character by another, characters’ personality/reaction to events, details about their car/plane/home, what time of year something happened, what I said about a secondary character’s background, and on and on.
If I’d been more savvy, I would have started tracking this information from the moment I began writing Blind Fury, and probably kept all the books in the series in one Scrivener project (more on the pros/cons of that here). That, or created a separate project solely to serve as the series bible.
Since I don't have a series bible yet, Project Search and Saved Search collections in Scrivener have been extremely helpful for tracking down details about secondary characters (who might now be primary) in past books. I used the search to find documents in which Scott—the hero of my current book, who was introduced in Blind Ambition—appears. Since he wasn’t a main character, these will be instances where he’s either talking, or being talked/thought about. Here’s the process I used (Mac and Windows).
From here, I can go through each document, noting down any important info about Scott for continuity, e.g. how he reacts to Tara and Dan, what kind of coffee he drinks when they see him in the break room, how he dresses, any offhand mentions about his past or where he lives, and the color of his eyes. This process can be used to search for anything from characters to locations to types of events, as long as you can narrow it down with a word or two.
Once you have a collection, it’s also a cinch to select and drag the files from the collection in one project to the Binder of another. Now you have them in the new project and don’t have to keep opening the old one for a quick search. Or, you could create a project to serve as a series bible (info only, no story text) and make that the repository for all new data about the series.
NOTE: Click the X at the bottom of the Binder to close the Collection. Click the Collections button or go to View—>Collections—>Hide Collections (Mac) or View—>Collections—>Collections (Windows) to hide the Collections pane.
To create a thorough series bible, I’ll need to reread my previous books. For now, the process outlined above is working well.
What do you include in a series bible? Got any other helpful tricks for creating one (with Scrivener or not)?
Need more help? Sign up for an online class, read more Scrivener articles, or schedule a private training session. If you don't already have it, you can download Scrivener here.
It takes a lot of mint green tea and dark chocolate to fuel these posts. If you found something helpful, please consider a small donation to my pantry (via PayPal, cc accepted). Thank you!
[give_form id=”11605″ show_title=”false”]
Well, last week's Tech Tuesday post on the cool search engine WolframAlpha went over like a lead balloon, so this week it's back to Scrivener to learn about advanced search features.
The easiest search to use in Scrivener is the Project Search, which is available from the Search box in the toolbar. You type in the word, word part, or phrase you're looking for, and a list of all documents containing your search string will appear in the binder. Click on each document to see the search string highlighted wherever it occurs in that file.
Simple!
To close the search results, click the small X at the bottom right corner of the Binder panel.
Now, what if you want to limit your search to your synopses, or you want it to be case-sensitive? Never fear, there's a menu for that. Just click on the magnifying glass (see image below).
If you find yourself performing the same search repeatedly, click on Save Search As Collection. The saved search will retain all of your preferences, and show up in your Collections with the title you provide. Go to View–>Collections–>[name of saved search] to run the search anytime and view the results.
One last note about searching. If you only want to search within the individual text document you're working on, go to Edit–>Find–>Find, and fill out the dialog box.
As always, for more information, check out my book or online courses.
Now that you know how to search, next week we'll discuss Project Replace. Happy hunting!
Need more help? Sign up for an online class, read more Scrivener articles, or schedule a private training session. If you don't already have it, you can download Scrivener here.
It takes a lot of mint green tea and dark chocolate to fuel these posts. If you found something helpful, please consider a small donation to my pantry (via PayPal, cc accepted). Thank you!
[Updated 8/25/14]
[give_form id=”11647″ show_title=”false”]