More Scrivener Love

I love organizing. And making lists. And being neurotic like that in general. Some people don't take the organizational approach to writing, and that works great for them. For me, organizing background information is one of my favourite parts of the process. It's also a great way to procrastinate if I'm dreading a section, or if I'm just not feeling the writing mojo.

Scrivener is an incredible tool for the kind of organization I love. And of course, its creators have videos for all this kind of stuff if you need a tutorial, but if you want to see some more Scrivener action, I've got the goods.

In the MS I'm currently working on the world has magic. A few different types, with different classes and levels. My characters don't delve too deep into this stuff in the first book, but it'll come into play in book two onwards. So I needed a way to organize the types of spells and what my characters know about them. I'm just going to jump right in and show you how that's going…

Creating a new folder (see the Folder+ button in the bottom left?) and calling it Grimoire.

Just for fun, giving it a Red Book icon. As you can see in my binder (left side
of the screen shot) I love all the different icons to choose from!

Laying out how I want each "page" of my grimoire to look.
I really went to town on the formatting.
You can blame my graphic design instincts.

Moving that layout to the Template Sheets folder makes it a template.
Renaming it something appropriate, like Grimoire Page.

Creating a new text page in the Grimoire folder, from Grimoire Page template.

Referencing the spell (highlighted) from the MS text (on the left split screen) and filling in
the details in the Grimoire Page (on the right split screen).

Because I want to organize the Grimoire by the three classes of magic, I create three
subfolders under the Grimoire, changing their names and icons.

Dragging and dropping different spells under the correct class of magic, and adjusting
the page order so the lower level spells come first.

And that, ladies and gents, is how I'm going to keep track of the different types of magic in Deyl's world, the different spells, and what she knows or has seen about them. Whenever I'm unsure, I can just flip open the grimoire and find the answers I need. With the split screen view turned on, I can even reference them next to the text I'm working on. It's pretty sweet.

If you're a Scrivener user—or thinking about becoming one—I hope this helped!   :D 

Bye for now,
S.