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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...

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....

Another question, from a recent session of the Simply Scrivener Special webinar series: How do you pull material into the Research folder? Easy! The blog post of 9 October 2015 introduced the concept of collecting Research resources within the Research folder. However, let's look at this feature of Scrivener in some more detail ...

I'm delighted to have as my guest today my friend, Dee (AKA Donna D Vaal), the author of The Living Miracle - A Love Story. Dee One of the early followers of this blog and also subscribes to my (free) Red Pen newsletter. When I saw that her novel had been published by Barnes & Noble, I had to ask the obvious question: Did you use Scrivener for 'The Living Miracle - A Love...

In Joseph Michael's free video series of Scrivener Secrets, his third video on publishing and exporting Secrets explains how to print, compile, share and export your work. Scrivener covers all angles The choice of templates provides for every eventuality: fiction, non-fiction, scriptwriting, etc. If you choose fiction, which is where I usually start, then all the 'normal' pages for the front matter are set up for you within the binder. All you have to do is fill...

On 6 April, my blog post Learn Scrivener Fast urged you to take up the offer of free video training, courtesy of Joseph Michael. Joe's second video,  Organising Your Writing For Complete Control explains how the Corkboard can give you an overview of your novel. The corkboard: revealing your novel's structure I enjoyed Joe's video, but the benefits of the corkboard feature were not news to me. I blogged about this last Autumn when...

In my last blog post, I recommended you take up the offer of free video training courtesy of Joseph Michael. I'm hoping you've had time to look at Video 1: Setting up Scrivener for Your Success. One thing that crossed my mind was that, while Joseph explained what the Binder is all about, the editing space was blank. Joseph imported a file that had already been written - easy! But what if...

For the uninitiated, CAMP NANOWRIMO is 30 days of writing, just like NaNoWriMo, except it's in April, and - as the name suggests -  this challenge involves escaping real life, holding yourself up in an internet-based cabin with other 'mad' writers with the express aim of completing a writing project. You don't have to write a novel. Or conjure up 50K words. You set your own goals, track your own progress and, in the process,...