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ipetraka · 11-04-2011, 01:07 AM

Vincent,

This is true, if you don't work in chunks the program may have less appeal as it is very much designed around the notion of constructing a long work as pieces and allowing an outline to emerge out of that---or the other way around is just as easy if one is a meticulous planner---or if one writes in long shots stuff can be broken down afterward with a simple shortcut. Now, I myself would ask the question: do you not write in pieces because you've been accustomed to software that discourages that? If the program you're using, say it's Word, makes it a huge pain to visualise the larger work from a folder full of files, then yes anyone will find themselves tending toward not writing that way, even if by nature---if liberated from the constraints of their tools---they would write in pieces.

The thing that sets Scrivener apart from other tools that take a piecemeal approach is its dynamic scoping ability, or the "Scrivenings" feature, which is a way of selecting an arbitrary slice of the entire book and viewing/editing it as though it were a single file in a word processor. For instance, many of of veterans break things down even smaller than scenes. Some go all the way down to paragraphs in tricky parts. You'd go insane trying to do that in Word, because no matter how good your Alt-Tab skills are, it'll be impossible to get a bird's eye view of the scene/chapter/part/book. In an outline that lets you expand or collapse the size of the text slice you are looking at dynamically, based on how much you want to see at that moment, it is however not a problem at all. It is inconsequential whether you've got 80 pieces of chapter or two. Meanwhile that piecemeal approach lets you take orthogonal views of your narrative that you might never have previously considered possible, like pulling every scene that character X is in and throwing them into a collection bin and reading them one after the other so you can monitor the character development and make sure there are no growth reversion or other pitfalls. Having an agile outline like that means so much more than just looking at a master authorial table of contents. It means all kinds of secondary benefits.

So that's really the key philosophical hurdle, I think, to understanding why this program works the way it does. It gets more powerful the smaller you break things down (to an obvious point, of course), without losing the ability to approach large sections of manuscript as though you were looking at "chapter_21.doc". Would there be value in it if you do use it that way? A long series of chapter length files? Absolutely. A lot of people work that way and love the program. I'd say far fewer take it a level higher and just write in one long item in the outliner---there is really no reason to do that---and it would constrict your options to work that way, like not getting a nice automatically formatted and linked table of contents in your epub. It would be like not using header styles in Word.

For serial novels like you mention; yup we've got a lot of folks doing that. While the program was designed around the one project one book model, it works quite well for series, too. You get all of your research in one place, scenes from book 12 can link back to scenes in book 3, you can view the total arc of a character from age 12 to age 70. Get as epic as you want and the software will let you go there.

11-04-2011, 01:07 AM	#25
ipetraka Junior Member Posts: 3 Karma: 27940 Join Date: Oct 2011 Device: Amazon Kindle	Vincent, This is true, if you don't work in chunks the program may have less appeal as it is very much designed around the notion of constructing a long work as pieces and allowing an outline to emerge out of that---or the other way around is just as easy if one is a meticulous planner---or if one writes in long shots stuff can be broken down afterward with a simple shortcut. Now, I myself would ask the question: do you not write in pieces because you've been accustomed to software that discourages that? If the program you're using, say it's Word, makes it a huge pain to visualise the larger work from a folder full of files, then yes anyone will find themselves tending toward not writing that way, even if by nature---if liberated from the constraints of their tools---they would write in pieces. The thing that sets Scrivener apart from other tools that take a piecemeal approach is its dynamic scoping ability, or the "Scrivenings" feature, which is a way of selecting an arbitrary slice of the entire book and viewing/editing it as though it were a single file in a word processor. For instance, many of of veterans break things down even smaller than scenes. Some go all the way down to paragraphs in tricky parts. You'd go insane trying to do that in Word, because no matter how good your Alt-Tab skills are, it'll be impossible to get a bird's eye view of the scene/chapter/part/book. In an outline that lets you expand or collapse the size of the text slice you are looking at dynamically, based on how much you want to see at that moment, it is however not a problem at all. It is inconsequential whether you've got 80 pieces of chapter or two. Meanwhile that piecemeal approach lets you take orthogonal views of your narrative that you might never have previously considered possible, like pulling every scene that character X is in and throwing them into a collection bin and reading them one after the other so you can monitor the character development and make sure there are no growth reversion or other pitfalls. Having an agile outline like that means so much more than just looking at a master authorial table of contents. It means all kinds of secondary benefits. So that's really the key philosophical hurdle, I think, to understanding why this program works the way it does. It gets more powerful the smaller you break things down (to an obvious point, of course), without losing the ability to approach large sections of manuscript as though you were looking at "chapter_21.doc". Would there be value in it if you do use it that way? A long series of chapter length files? Absolutely. A lot of people work that way and love the program. I'd say far fewer take it a level higher and just write in one long item in the outliner---there is really no reason to do that---and it would constrict your options to work that way, like not getting a nice automatically formatted and linked table of contents in your epub. It would be like not using header styles in Word. For serial novels like you mention; yup we've got a lot of folks doing that. While the program was designed around the one project one book model, it works quite well for series, too. You get all of your research in one place, scenes from book 12 can link back to scenes in book 3, you can view the total arc of a character from age 12 to age 70. Get as epic as you want and the software will let you go there.