In “ Write by Accident, Refine by Design,” I wrote about editing and revising those scores of textual snippets - written completely out of narrative order - and my efforts to piece them together into a cohesive whole.Īt this point, I have roughly 76,000 words all compiled in the same text document. Some major chunks are stitched together and every piece of text, large or small, has been edited and tweaked at least twice. Should I place one protagonist’s encounter with law enforcement in a downtown Vietnamese restaurant before or after his sister-in-law’s artistic origin story? Where should I put a political announcement that turns another protagonist’s existence inside out? What’s missing is the complete narrative roadmap. When dealing with multiple, complex characters and timelines over such a huge span of text - and having assembled that text in the admittedly haphazard manner I did - making decisions about structure can prove challenging.
#Scrivener for windows tutorial software#
In a recent web video, best-selling author Jill Santopolo (who I interviewed for “ 10 Tips For Creating Your First Children’s Picture Book“) talked about working with Scrivener software to help organize her writing. She used the tool to move parts of the narrative around and keep track of various storylines. Since I’m working hard on challenges similar to Santopolo’s, I decided to give the software a try.
Scrivener was easy to purchase, download, and install. Upon initial launch, the software pointed me to a thorough tutorial. I generally spend as little time as possible on “how-to” documents in favor of experimenting with software and learning as I work. That said, Scrivener’s tutorial was, not surprisingly, extremely well-written, organized in a user-friendly way, and very helpful. I highly recommend spending at least 20 minutes going through it before diving any further. I saw right away that Scrivener was an impressive piece of software.
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