Writing Novels Step 2: Setup Scrivener

After getting Scrivener registered, here’s what I suggest… go and do two searches on the internet.

  • Free Scrivener templates
    Free name files for Scrivener

You’ll find some of both. You’ll also find someone who’s charging for his templates. Okay, I guess, but most of us prefer our templates to be USED. The “Free name files for Scrivener” search will yield a gentleman who spent a LOT of valuable time compiling more name lists for Scrivener. You want those. Install those on a day when you’re doing something. Some name files take up to 30 minutes to install.

Now, you want to start a Scrivener project. I’ve learned from one man, who suggests using the fiction templates even for non-fiction! Well! That’s actually a really great idea!

Try a project from each template. Save your first project to Dropbox. The rest after that should automatically try to save to Dropbox. (important – you don’t want your computer to crash and lose EVERYTHING!) The template I like the most is actually not even mine – it’s the 30 chapter template! That one has great info on how to set up your novel’s pacing, and it showed me where my first novel was broken! I may contact the author, and ask if I can import his headers (or variations of them) into my setup.
Try one of each. See which one you like best.

Next, I like to go to the View menu, and add icon color to… almost everything. I don’t like it in the outliner. Aside from that, I like it colorful. It inspires me. Although when I’m writing a longer scene, I’ll often go to full screen mode.

Backups

This part’s pretty easy to do. Under the file-backup menu, you’ll see “back up to…”. Choose that. Go to Dropbox, and create a folder called “Scrivener Backups”. Set ALL of your projects to back up to that directory. They’ll create a zip file of your project to use in case something goes wrong.

Now, you’re ready to start writing!
But first…

Images

Create a folder in your My Documents – pictures for stories. You can’t directly save any images you need for your novels into Scrivener. They have to be imported from a folder INTO your story. Not the best way to do it, but okay. Some people apparently like to have an image on the fullscreen mode.
I do in one novel, don’t in the rest. In my character profiles, I do import pictures for some characters. Well, only one. But it was important. And I have images for the locations. Yes, you want to fill all that out!

But we’ll talk about that more in the planning section.

About the author

Screenplay writer and fiction author