How to Outline, Brainstorm, and Research Your Novel with Scrivener
A few days ago, I made a post outlining all of the basic reasons to love Scrivener, especially heading into NaNoWriMo. Today I thought I’d follow up on that post by highlighting a few ways to use Scrivener’s unique features to plan your novel. (I’ll follow this up later with short guides about drafting and revising in Scrivener.)
Outlining
In the binder of on the left-hand side of the screen, you’ll see a folder for your manuscript. On the right-hand side of the top toolbar, you’ll see a corkboard icon. Selecting both of these options will take you to the screen in he first image.
Here you can start outlining your novel. By clicking the green square on the top toolbar, you can add new texts to your manuscript. Once you add a text, an index card will appear you can give it a working title and short synopsis.
You don’t have to outline every chapter in order. Or even every chapter. Once you have an idea for a scene, create a card for it, write a summary, and drag it and drop it to its approximate location in your story.
Throw every scene idea you have into your outline and delete them as you narrow down your plot to a single arc.
If you have ideas for dialog or descriptions, you can type them up in the notes section in the Inspector on the right-hand side of your screen.
You can also outline in the screen in the second image by clicking the icon to the right of the corkboard icon on your toolbar.
When you’re ready to start writing, simply click on the text in the binder and begin. Your summary and notes will be in the inspector on the right-hand side of your drafting screen, ready for you to implement.
Brainstorming
Characters
Characters have their own folder in the binder, as well as their own corkboard. (Accessed just like the manuscript corkboard is accessed.) As you come up with characters for your novel, you can create index cards with their names/roles and a few notes.
The text files these index cards will create a little character questionnaire form for you to fill out, which you can see an example of in the fourth image. The best thing about these questionnaires is that you can change the items in them by editing the template in the template folder in your binder, to reflect your own character-building methods. (If you know anything about this blog, you’ll probably know how much I dislike being given someone else’s character questionnaire.)
You can also add images of your characters to their sketches. Simply drag and drop the image file into the box that acts as the ‘summary’ box on manuscript text index cards.
This is a handy location for keeping all of your character brainstorming, where you can easily reference it while drafting.
Locations
Locations have a folder that functions exactly the same as the character folder, with a different template for location sketches. You can store information about cities, streets, buildings, etc. here. If you have trouble recalling layouts, designs, and descriptions, store that information in the location folder and it will always be a click away.
Other
If there are other elements of your novel you’d like to keep track of (Magic spells/magic system? Fantasy creatures? Murder methods? Featured artworks?) you can do so easily. Create a new folder in your binder. In the template folder, add a new text and devise your template. When you want to add a new template text to your folder, click and hold the arrow next to the green ‘add’ button in your toolbar, and select your template.
Research
The research folder is my favorite. You can drag and drop almost any kind of file into the research folder. In this example, I have an image, a song, a pdf, and a webpage.
Yes. You can save webpages to your research, and they’ll appear almost exactly as they do on a web browser. (To do this, save a webpage as an .html file to your desktop, drag it into your research folder, delete it from your desktop, and you can check it out whether you’re connected to wifi or not.)
The music will play in the Scrivener window itself, as will any videos you add. Pdfs and word files can be read in Scrivener as well.
Honestly, I don’t know of any file types that you can’t simply throw into Scrivener.
You can create folders for characters/topics/chapters and organize your research, or you can just throw it all on the corkboard.
As you research topics for your manuscript, you can throw literally everything into your research folder. It can act as a mood board with images or it can store a tome’s worth of .pdfs about topics in your manuscript. Or it can do both.
You don’t need to open a bunch of programs to view webpages, images, and pdfs to view your research.
You don’t need to search for your brainstorming in a bunch of different notebooks and paper scraps or word files. (Although you can totally brainstorm in a notebook while away from your computer, and type up the ideas you like in Scriv later.)
You don’t need to scratch out, toss, and rewrite an outline just because you want to move a few scenes around, or keep one pinned to your desk or carry one around in your backpack.
With Scrivener, all of your brainstorming, researching, and outlining is integrated into your manuscript file, perfectly organized and easily accessible.
Scrivener has a free NaNoWriMo special edition trial that can be used from now until December 7th. Download it here.
