Scrivener #3 - Importing An Existing Manuscript (Pt 2)

This is the third in a series of blog posts based on my experience of Scrivener - A Swiss Army Knife of a tool for writers. The previous post can be found HERE. The complete series can be found HERE.

At the end of the last blog post I had successfully imported my manuscript into Scrivener and chopped it up into chapters, The next job was go through it and edit it. This was fairly easy to do on a chapter by chapter basis.

As I went through each chapter I made notes in the Inspector (a panel open on the right hand side of the screen) about anything I needed to remember for later. This included questions of plot that I wanted to make sure I’d resolved, and other character notes. And speaking of character notes, I also took the opportunity to create character reference sheets for each of my characters (see below). This was a great help as previously I’d had other files scattered all over my PC, which were used to help me when I wrote. I also imported pictures into my project that I could again use for reference while I was writing.

One of the neat features about Scrivener is that you can have two window panes open at the same time, perhaps one to type in and one that shows a scene you are trying to describe (see below). This is really helpful.

Editing my old manuscripts, although laborious, is a much simplified task using Scrivener. And I can even move pieces of the plot around if I need to (which will be very useful in my later, unpublished, books).

Once I was happy with the edit process, all I had to do was ‘compile’ it, ready for export to either a PDF, a Word document, or an ebook. This will be the topic of my next post.