When a new idea gets my juices flowing, I want to write it down before it gets away. If I’m at my notebook computer, a new Scrivener project is ideal. I click File -> New Project and then… Damn! Scrivener stops me in my tracks. It demands to know if this is gonna be a […]

If it’s in the Binder, you can assign it a label, but only one label. That seems rather limiting, don’t you think? Well, yes and no. Let’s explore a little bit. Here’s the set of labels in one of my current projects. I’ve pencilled in some dividers because I use them for three different things […]

Plotters plan a story’s major events, then they write using that guide. (Pantsers, on the other hand, simply jump right in to the writing and “see where it goes.”) I’ve mentioned the Seven Point System in other posts. For additional details, use the Search box (at https://www.flat5.net/) to find all the links. The screen capture […]

Introduction WordPress’ WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view is great for simple posts. With it, I can dash off a few paragraphs, throw in an image or two, emphasize some words and bold-face others, and hit Publish. Voila, I’ve posted my opinion! That works great for a simple idea. But when the […]

Scrivener is for big writing such as novels and non-fiction books. It is also wonderful with briefer works such as short stories, blog posts, and things that start small but might later bloom. To cope with the big works, Scrivener can do a lot of things. And there’s the rub: like the works it supports, […]

Metadata describes or points to other data. In Scrivener, the metadata variable <$author> is the name for a project’s author. In my case, that’d be E D Skinner. There’s also metadata for the name of the current project, <$projectname>. It contains the name of the project–its filename–when it was created. Note: The steps and screenshots that […]

Introduction Over thousands of years, storytellers have learned two things about people: They listen, read, or watch stories as escape from their lives, and They will sympathize with characters who fight and defeat powerful enemies, or that fight but succumb to terrible injustices. Whether you are a Plotter who plans his stories before writing, or a […]

Let’s say we just want to create a simple book, nothing fancy, with Scrivener. We have three chapters named In The Beginning, The Middle, and It End’th. In the first chapter, we have two scenes, one to get the action going, and a second in which all Hell breaks loose. (It writerly terms, that second […]

I started re-reading “The Compile Format Designer” chapter in the Scrivener Manual (Scrivener, Help -> Scrivener Manual, chapter 24) today. Note: The steps and screenshots that follow are for Scrivener 3.2.2 on a MacBook running MacOS Big Sur 11.2. If you have a different version or platform, some adjustments may be needed. To facilitate some experimentation, […]

If you know WYSIWYG, an abbreviation for What You See Is What You Get, you’ll remember that it promised to put the same thing on paper that you saw on the screen. That is, whatever your text looked like on the computer’s LCD, that’s what it’d look like on paper. In the dawn of text […]