Scrivener and the mosaic of writing

Let's talk Scrivener again. Or rather let's talk writing, because they're one and the same thing really. The single most attractive thing about Scrivener for me is that it sees books as they really are, a mosaic of scenes and ideas, not as a single great glob of text, as does a word processor such as Word.

What do I mean by this? Simple. When you write a book by Scrivener every scene, chapter, element, call it what you will, exists both as a separate document, with its own word count, time stamp and individual descriptions and synopsis, and as an integral component of the book as a whole. If I want to see when I last edited a scene I look at the date in the inspector sidebar. If I want to make a note pertaining to that piece of the story alone it goes there too. When I want to move around story elements I do them logically, by visually dragging them to new positions where I can see their context, not by cutting and pasting unseen amounts of text around the place which can be both messy and dangerous.

Equally, if I think the positioning is wrong I just drag the thing back or find a new home for it. Moving scenes around is something I highly recommend. It can change the pace and tenor of a story. It's hard to do with conventional word processor cut and paste. With Scrivener it's a doddle. Let me give you an example from the next Costa book to show you what I mean.



Here is the original opening of The Blue Demon (US City of Fear), a story set in the world of Italian politics, around the Quirinale hill. At the beginning of this version of the story a junior politician has been kidnapped by a scary and mysterious individual. It looks like this. Click for the full version

Scrivener users will recognise the binder on the left hand side of the screen. This is where scenes/chapters are listed. It's perfect for outlining, and to keep things neat and tidy I divided this book into sections, represented here by folders. I'm a section kind of guy when it comes to most books. I like the rhythm they introduce to the kind of work I do. Not everyone will work this way though.

When I came to revise this book I wondered about this opening. It's good and exciting but it's linear too. So I decided to try an experiment. Why not start the book near the end? In other words take part of the climax and use that as the beginning, then flashing back into the main story, and picking up the thread at the climax.

Here is that climax in the original version.

Something serious is starting to happen here. What I want to do is split this chapter in two and move the top half to the beginning. Again, this is very easy with cut and paste but involves guesswork and those invisible words flying round the clipboard. In Scrivener it's much more sensible. I put the cursor where I want to break the chapter and then hit Command-K. What I get is this.

See what's happened? I now have two chapters instead of one, and the second has automatically been labelled Sordi attacked -1. I want something more memorable so I just rename it 'Quirinale intro'.

Then I drag it to the beginning of the story.

After that I need to write a few new introductory sentences to both the new chapter and the original. Basic tidying up stuff really to make sure everything runs together properly. Then I go back to the original beginning, which takes place three days before the climax, and write in a single italicised line...

Three days earlier...

And that's it. Minimum of fuss, maximum of control. The book's got a tighter, more exciting opening I hope. And everything is an absolute doddle to undo if I decide I don't like it.

Now try doing that with Word.

Update September 2010 -- actually you can do this very easily in Word 2010 for Windows, though not quite so elegantly.