Since everyone’s been posting stories about how they use Scrivener (the world’s most awesome writing software), I figured I would join in the fun and post one thing about one of its best features.
So there I am, writing along, when I make up a new character on the fly. How on earth am I going to keep track of all of these new characters? I can barely keep track of the ones I know in real life. Well, Scrivener makes it so easy. First, you select the name.
Then you can use a contextual menu (holding down the control key and clicking, like I did here) or go up to the Edit… menu and select “Append Selection to Document” and then “New”:
You’ll get lots of possibilities to choose from, like Manuscript (which will create a new document in your manuscript) or Place or whatever. I choose “Characters.”
Whereupon Scrivener creates a new Character file for me with that character’s name on it. Of course it’s blank — I have to fill that in.
I continue to write my masterwork and find out lots of amazing things about this Rob Smith fellow, many of which I don’t know until I type them.
And because I’d like to keep track of every bit of description about Rob Smith so I don’t describe him as nine feet tall next time, I add this info to his file.
After I’ve added a number of things to Rob Smith’s character sheet, I can then fill in the rest of the sheet and make sure what I know about him is consistent about what I’ve said about him in the book.
Seriously, this is why writers are so batcrap insane about Scrivener. This stuff is the bomb.