Distractions. Today’s culture has plenty of them, and they seem to have caused an epidemic of short attention spans. When writing, the easiest way to be distraction free is to close down the programs that distract you. That means close your email program, any social media pages open on your browser, and possibly even your…
Many writers prefer to have a distraction-free screen as they write. For Scrivener users that means working with the binder and inspector closed. But when you need to do specific tasks that can often mean reopening either. Today, I’d like to show you some Scrivener shortcuts that will help you avoid that.
You’re quoting the Bible in your book and many of the verses use LORD in small caps. But you don’t know how to get those little capitals so you type LORD in your manuscript. Or maybe you missed the fact completely that Lord was in all caps. I see that often in the nonfiction manuscripts I edit….
You’re writing your story in multiple point of view. How do you keep track of how many scenes you have in each POV? Your story has a specific time frame. How do you track your scenes to ensure you follow that timeline? Maybe your story takes place in 5 different cities. How can you ensure…
Making Scrivener work for you—rather than the other way around—can start with customizing your toolbars. Scrivener offers a lot of tools to make things easy. As you discover them, you’ll want the ones you use most, on your toolbar for easy access. Last time we were talking about snapshots and I promised to tell…
In my pre-Scrivener days of writing, I used MS Word. It got the job done, but when it was time to revise I got paranoid. What if I didn’t like all the changes I had just made? What if I liked most of them, but not all? What if deleted an entire scene, then two…
Scenes are the building blocks of your story. So let’s take a quick look at the definition of a scene. Jack M. Bickham, in his book Scene & Structure, defines scene this way: It’s a segment of story action, written moment-by-moment, without summary, presented onstage in the story “now.” James Scott Bells says in Plot…
Every writer has words she or he uses too often. I call them crutch words. Words like “well, smiled, laughed, however, tears, cried” etc., in addition to adverb usage. These words aren’t easily spotted when you revise simply because you’re looking at other things like character and plot development. So today I’m going to show…