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One of the most powerful features in Scrivener is the option to use the corkboard to outline your story. The structure of a novel A novel is essentially one scene after another. These scenes can be grouped into chapters and, if you want, you can group the chapters into parts. Recall that you can opt to set up a novel with parts using the Scrivener project templates. My LOL: Left Over Lovers doesn't have parts - I'm...

In the same way, as a scriptwriter sets the scene for a play or a film, a novelist needs to invent the world for the cast of characters to inhabit. The choice for each set within the world of your novel is entirely yours. You could stick close to home using familiar locations. Distant lands could give you the excuse to travel for research purposes. Or, you could create invent a world set...

One of the fun parts of writing a new novel is casting your characters: giving them names, deciding their hopes and dreams, and identifying their strengths and weaknesses. Everyone needs a secret, and only you will decide what it is and if and when the other characters might discover it. Setting up a new character sketch To set up a new character sketch, right click on the Characters folder and select Add / New From...

Let’s start at the very beginning: setting up a new project file on Scrivener and deciding what our novel is about. Setting up a new project file In this one file, everything that you need to write your NANO novel can be collected ahead of 1 November. You won’t write a single word of your manuscript until NANO officially starts, but you’ll have everything at your fingertips when the whistle blows at...

Today’s blog post is the first of a series for those who might decide to use Scrivener for NaNoWriMo 2016. (NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and that's November - the month I set aside each year to write, write, write.) Why use Scrivener for NaNoWriMo 2016? Mainly, I use Scrivener because it makes me feel I am in control. Scrivener lets me see my novel from the top down, from the bottom...

  My book launch for EDITING The RedPen Way Last Tuesday went brilliantly. I'm still giddy from all the excitement. Hundreds of copies were downloaded and many of you have signed up for RedPen. Welcome! I've had excellent reviews too. All 5 star! Here's an extract from just one of them. A masterclass in self-editing ...

The next 8 weeks will fly by, so - if you are keen to use Scrivener for NANO 2016 - now is the time to start learning how. What is NANO? NANO, short of NaNoWriMo, is the  National Novel Writers Month. Writers all over the world spend the 30 days of November writing the first 50K words of their novel. The NaNoWriMo website opens its doors in October and then the fun starts....

I've not posted in a while, but I have a great excuse: I've been busy compiling with Scrivener and now have three versions of the same manuscript: EDITING The RedPen Way. I've learnt much much more about the power of Scrivener in the past three weeks, but the best bit (there are so many best bits!) is the flexibility of output. I explain below why I had three different forms of output, and I'll...

This week, I’ve been focusing on Scrivener Links. On Tuesday, I explained how to create Scrivener Links that allow a reader to jump from one part of my ebook or Kindle version to another. On Thursday, the focus was on Scrivener Links that take the reader to a website. This posting tackles how to set up the links within the table of contents (TOC). Table of Contents (TOC) All books need a table...

This week, I’m focusing on Scrivener Links. On Tuesday, I explained how to create Scrivener Links that allow a reader to jump from one part of my ebook or Kindle version to another. Today, the focus is on Scrivener Links that take the reader to a website. The next posting will then tackle how to set up the links within the table of contents (TOC). If you have any questions about...