When you compile a Scrivener project, you stitch together all its texts to export a single file. It’s easy to compile for print, PDF, or Microsoft Word format to share your manuscript with others.

When working in Scrivener, you plan, write, rearrange sections and chapters, and piece together your manuscript. At some point, you will want to export it to send to a critique partner, agent, or editor, or as an ebook if you self-publish. In Scrivener, this process is called compiling.

When Scrivener compiles a project, it stitches together its various elements, recognizing the structure of folders and files to create the sections and chapters of a final manuscript. You can tweak the Compile interface in many ways, but most people never need to go beyond the basics.

In this article, we look at compiling a Scrivener project for print, PDF, and Microsoft Word .docx formats. In a previous article, we looked at compiling Scrivener projects for ebooks that you can use if you self-publish.

What is compiling?

Scrivener projects are made up of a number of folders and files, and the app needs to combine them to export your project to a single file. No matter how complex your Binder – whether you use only files for chapters, or have folders and sub-folders with multiple scene files for each chapter – the manuscript is still linear. It starts at the top of the Binder and proceeds to the last file in the Draft or Manuscript folder.

Compiling connects all these files, recognizing divisions such as parts and chapters and the files they contain. It also applies styles to them, regardless of how the files are formatted within Scrivener.

As you’ll see below, the Compile screen has many options, but most users don’t need to go beyond a few basic settings.

Default template compile settings

Scrivener templates contain specific compile settings for the type of document they are designed to produce. While you can use the Blank template to create any project, using a specific template – such as Novel, Novel with Parts, or General Non-Fiction – can make compiling simpler.

In Different Ways of Setting Up Scrivener’s Binder for Your Projects, we discuss various ways of setting up the Binder for your project, and the first three examples are the most practical for most uses. From left to right, these show the Novel template, the Novel with Parts template, and the Blank template when first created.

The first two projects contain compile settings adapted to that project; the Blank project does not have any specific settings.

The Compile Overview screen

Let’s look at the basics of compiling a Scrivener project. I’ll use the Novel, Novel with Parts, and General Non-Fiction templates as examples to show how the process works and how the default settings differ between the two projects.

To start with, choose File > Compile. This opens the Compile Overview screen.

There are three columns on this screen, displayed above using the Novel template:

• Formats: This is a list of preset format options; different project templates provide different options.
• Section Layouts: This section is where you apply styles to different section types, such as chapter headings or scenes, to tell Scrivener how you want them to look in the exported document.
• Compile Options: This column offers a number of options, such as choosing the section type for different elements, including or excluding folders or files, and more. Scrivener has applied default section types to Front Matter, Chapter Heading, and Scene in this column; you can tell that these are the defaults because they are in italics. If you choose a specific section type, they won’t be in italics.

Projects created from different templates provide different options in the Compile Options column. Here’s the Compile Overview screen for the Novel in Parts template; it adds a Part Heading section type in the Compile Options column:

And the General Non-Fiction template includes a Contents page, a Foreword, and Sections instead of Scenes:

Compile Formats

The left column of the Compile Overview screen lists a number of formats. These include outlines, Manuscript formats designed for standard publishing conventions, different-sized paperback pages, and more. In most cases, you’ll use one of these formats, but you can tweak these or create your own compile formats.

If you’re compiling your project to send to a critique partner, agent, or publisher, choose one of the two Manuscript formats. They use standard publishing conventions and only differ by the font they use: the first uses Courier, a monospace font, and the second uses Times Roman, a variable-width or proportional font.

If you want to go further, you can click the + button at the bottom of the column and choose New Format to roll your own, or Duplicate & Edit Format to tweak an existing format. This gives you many advanced options for how your project compiles:

Using the Duplicate & Edit option is ideal if you want to make minor changes to a format, while creating a new format means you have to set up everything from scratch.

Chapter 24 of the Scrivener manual goes into detail about these options.

Setting up section layouts

The center section of the Compile Overview screen is where you tell Scrivener how you want your compiled document to look. In many cases, this will be determined by the compile format you selected in the left column. The Manuscript formats, for example, are designed to conform to publishing industry standards with 12-point, double-spaced fonts. If you’re compiling your manuscript to send to an agent or editor, it’s best to choose one of these formats.

If, however, you want to customize the way your compiled document looks – choosing your own font, spacing, alignment, etc. – then you can create your own section layouts and assign them to specific section types.

Sections in Scrivener are such elements as Part Heading, Chapter Heading, Scene, Chapter, and so on. Think of them as the constituent elements of a book or document; defining styles for each element results in coherent output. You generally want all your chapter titles in the same font, size, alignment, and weight, and you only need to assign styles once to each section type. This is similar to using styles in a word processor.

Note that these section layouts override any formatting you have made to your text within Scrivener. This means that you can use very different formatting while you’re writing, revising, and editing from what you eventually export. You can, however, use the As-Is section type if you want to retain your formatting as it displays in Scrivener.

For more on section types and section layouts, see Using Section Layouts to Compile Your Scrivener Project.

Choosing what to include in your compiled document

Scrivener’s Binder contains many folders and files. The topmost folder, named Draft or Manuscript depending on the template, contains the text of your project in folders and files. The other folders in the Binder, such as Characters, Places, Research, etc., are not meant to be compiled and don’t display in the Compile Options column. Compiling only includes items in your top-level folder.

By default, the Compile Overview screen shows every item in the top-level folder of your Binder as selected. In most cases, this is ideal: you want Scrivener to compile every item that you have written.

But you may not always want to do this. You may want to compile the first few chapters of your manuscript, for example, to send to an agent. In that case, uncheck the items that you don’t want Scrivener to include in the compiled document.

You can also limit the scope of Scrivener’s compile by clicking the menu at the top of the Compile Options column and choosing any folder in your project.

And it is here that you can choose to include front and/or back matter in your compiled document. See How to Use Front and Back Matter when You Compile Your Scrivener Projects for more on this, and see chapter 23.4 of the Scrivener manual for more on the options in this column.

Compiling for print, PDF, or Microsoft Word

At the top of the Compile Overview screen is a menu labeled Compile for. Click this menu to see the file types that Scrivener can compile.

In most cases, you’ll be compiling to PDF or .docx, or perhaps for Print, which compiles your project and sends it to your printer. If you want to print your document, it’s probably better to compile to PDF, check the document, and then print it. If there’s anything wrong with the layout and you send it to your printer right away, you may waste paper and ink.

Choose your format from this menu. Scrivener asks you to name the file it exports, then it creates the file. In the Save dialog, there is an option to have Scrivener open the compiled document after saving; if you have more than one app on your computer that can open that type of file, you can choose which app the file opens in.

After you’ve compiled the project, you can open the file and view it to check that everything is as it should be and, if not, go back to Scrivener and make changes. With editable formats, such as .docx or .rtf, you can make changes in the compiled document, but that’s not easy to do with a PDF file, unless you have special PDF editing software.

Compiling Scrivener projects looks daunting, but for most use cases, it is quite simple. As this article shows, it takes just a few clicks to export your project as a PDF or Microsoft Word document. If you’re self-publishing, the process has more options; a forthcoming article explains how to compile a Scrivener project as an ebook.

Show notes:

• Jonas Enander
• Facing Infinity
• Jonas Enander on Instagram
• DEVONthink
• Ed Yong: An Immense World

Learn more about Scrivener, and check out the ebook Take Control of Scrivener.

If you like the podcast, please follow it on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Leave a rating or review, and tell your friends. And check out past episodes of Write Now with Scrivener.

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Jonas Enander is an astrophysicist whose book is entitled Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our Place on Earth.

Jonas Enander studied astronomy at university, “and very quickly I became passionate about it and also about mathematics. So I switched to theoretical physics. My training is in physics, but I always lean towards the astronomy and the cosmology side of it.”

I asked Jonas what an astrophysicist does. He explained that, “an astronomer is someone who looks at the skies, who knows all the techniques of how to use telescopes, how to observe very deep into space. An astrophysicist, on the other hand, also does physical modeling [of] all the phenomena that we see in space, how the stars work, how the galaxies rotate, all that stuff.”

The book Facing Infinity starts with a slightly scary description of what it would be like to be sucked into a black hole. “Like I write in the book, no author really wants to kill the reader on the first few pages. But black holes, we often think of them as very mysterious. So the sensible thing to do, to understand them, is to put a human next to them. What would they do with a human? What would they do with our bodies? It feels like a very natural way to start a book.”

If we’re familiar with black holes, it’s from science fiction novels or movies. I asked if the depiction of the black hole in the film Interstellar is realistic. Jonas said that the film “is based on the scientific theories of black holes. And then, of course, they added Hollywood speculations and, let’s say, Hollywood makeup to the black holes to make them look even more interesting. I think Interstellar does a very good job at displaying what a black hole would be like. But then when they go into it, you have a lot more speculation going on.”

Science fiction also suggests that black holes lead to wormholes and to a multiverse. I asked Jonas what he thinks about that. “I’m agnostic if wormholes could exist or not. I don’t know; potentially. Do we have multiverses? I don’t know; potentially. I used to be a researcher in general relativity and physics, but now I do full-time science writing. I treat it a bit more sociologically. These are the ideas that we as humans here on this little planet Earth have come up with, looking out into the cosmos, and scientists seriously entertain them. So for me, it’s more like seeing the scientists believing that these ideas could be true. That’s how I treat it.”

This is a way of looking at the scientists ethnographically and seeing what their belief systems are. “Science is a human endeavor. You see all the emotions, all the prestige fighting. I mean, who doesn’t want to win a Nobel Prize? That’s also something that informs a lot of scientific work, this kind of prestige. But it’s important to emphasize that even though all this human side to science is going on in the background, we still manage to produce objective knowledge about the universe.”

This is Jonas’s first book, and he said that, “I started writing a bit in Word in the beginning, but I felt like there’s so much text, there’s so [many] sources I’m using, this becomes a horrible mess. I needed something more structured, and I found Scrivener and started using it. What I primarily use it for is the Binder, where you can see all the different texts that you’re working with, and you can have subsections and folders. When you work with an entire book, 300 to 400 pages, and all the notes and everything, it becomes a lot of material. You need to have a structure. Very often, you write something and then you’re like, ‘Oh, but this should actually go in that chapter,’ or ‘I should change the order,’ or ‘The flow of the text isn’t quite working.’ It’s great in Scrivener that you can restructure your text so easily.”

Jonas often switched between Scrivener on his Mac and on his iPad. “I also have Scrivener on my iPad. When I’m at the final stage of a chapter, I sync it with my iPad. So when I’m sitting on the bus, I can fire up my iPad and the Scrivener document. I get the entire text, but without all the cluttering that you have when you’re working on a laptop. It’s very focused, and I can sit and read the document, and I can do more stylistic changes. And then it syncs back to my laptop, and I can do the final exporting and so on later.”

And he used Composition Mode a lot, where Scrivener just displays text on a background without the rest of the interface. “There’s a lot of discussion today about your attention and focus being the most valuable commodity that you have as a worker. So I use that a lot. You also have different ways of writing at different stages in your process. When you write at the beginning stages, you just need to dump everything that’s in your brain. It can be as badly written as you like. You need to turn off that internal critic and just get everything out there. I find Composition Mode very good for just writing, writing, writing.”

A science like astrophysics is a long game, and I asked Jonas how it feels to be researching something where you know that in your lifetime, you will not find the answer. He said, “It feels great. We live in the golden age of black hole astronomy. There’s so much new material, observations, and theoretical ideas coming out right now. There are so many people working on this. And we are learning a lot about black holes right now. So I’m feeling very lucky to be able to be a part of this and write about it and tell other people about it.”

There are few similarities between poetry and longer-form writing like short stories, novels, or non-fiction books. However, they all use language. Poetry is probably the most language-conscious form of writing, in part because of its concision, but also because poetry is more attentive to the sound and rhythm of language.

Poetry is also often more suggestive than prose, which generally recounts narrative stories. Poetry often uses using images and metaphors, and frequently focuses on emotion, mood, or isolated moments.

All these characteristics of poetry can be valuable tools for writers of other types of works. Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, short stories or memoirs, learning about how to write poetry can help you hone your language skills and improve your writing.

A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver

If you want to learn about the way poetry works – the elements that make up a poem – this is a great place to start. Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winner Mary Oliver distills the basics of poems in this 130-page book with little fluff, but with loads of insight. She discusses rhythm, meter, different poetic forms, imagery, and more in a no-nonsense style. The goal of this book is not so much to make you a poet, but to show how poems are made. Oliver teaches the craft of poetry, not the art – which is harder to teach – and she says, “it is craft […] that carries an individual’s ideas to the edge of familiar territory.”

The sounds of words are important in poetry, and Oliver spends some time discussing the different vowels and consonants of English and how they work together to build the atmosphere of a poem. While writers of fiction and non-fiction may not care about rhythm and meter – but more on that below – mastering the sounds of words can help improve the flow of every author’s writing.

Rules of the Dance, by Mary Oliver

While A Poetry Handbook is about all the basic elements of poetry, Rules of the Dance focuses on metrical verse and expands on some chapters in the earlier book. Much contemporary poetry is written in free verse – lines that don’t have consistent rhythm and that don’t rhyme – but there are valid reasons for learning about meter and scansion. Understanding these elements can be very helpful to writers of fiction and non-fiction.

You will learn how a line of metrical poetry roughly corresponds to the number of words one can speak in a single breath. And you will learn about scansion, the way word stress and rhythm combine to form lines of poetry. These two elements can help you write dialogue that sounds more realistic and compose sentences that flow more smoothly.

After teaching about these poetic elements, the second half of the book is An Anthology of Metrical Poems, which lets you see these features in action.

I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like: A Comprehensive Compilation of History’s Greatest Analogies, Metaphors, and Similes by Dr. Mardy Grothe

Poetry involves using words in unique ways, offten through metaphor, simile, and analogy. In A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver has a brief chapter on Imagery, which discusses the basics of these linguistic elements, but not in any depth. While I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like is not a book about writing poetry, as a compilation of these imagistic forms of language, it can help writers understand how they function.

There is always the risk of going overboard, laying it on thick, or beating a dead horse when using this sort of phrase and veering into the realm of cliché. Carefully chosen metaphors, similes, and analogies are like tidbits of a tasting menu of creative writing. Reading the examples in this book can help prime your mind toward this way of thinking and inspire you to judiciously use these elements in your writing.

A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry, by Robert Hass

Form poems are poems with constraints. Most people are familiar with the sonnet and the haiku, but other forms include the ode, the elegy, and the georgic. While metrical poetry has its own constraints, these forms add other types of constraints, such as rhythmic patterns (like AABA) or limitations in the number of syllables (as with haiku). As Hass says, “the essential expressive gestures inside those forms, forms that have held traditional shapes of grief, rage, longing, spite, adoration, have persisted, and it seemed that there could be ways of understanding the persistence of those shapes of thought and feeling.”

While prose has different constraints than poetry, limitations can free authors to write more creatively. Understanding how these forms work and how form is related to certain types of thought can bring insight into any type of writing.

Poetry anthologies

The best way to learn how to write poetry is to read poems, poetry anthologies can help you discover poems written over time by authors you may not be familiar with. Some examples:

The Library of America anthologies American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century offer exhaustive selections of a diverse range of American authors. The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1950 claims to include “The best of English poetry in one volume.”

There are many contemporary poetry anthologies and annual selections to choose from, and there are plenty of anthologies of poetry from different cultures and languages as well. You can discover different ways of thinking and images from other cultures and other times, and understand how poets over time have been influenced by these works from languages different than their own.

It seems like every app these days wants to force AI onto its users. Productivity apps, such as word processors, spreadsheets, presentation apps, and note-taking apps; creative apps such as photo editors and design tools; and even operating systems, like Windows and macOS. No matter which apps you use, it’s hard to avoid AI anymore, unless you use Scrivener.

Scrivener and AI

As Literature & Latte, the developer of Scrivener, points out in the support document Does Scrivener use AI?, “Scrivener itself contains no artificial intelligence (AI).” Scrivener is designed for creative writers to create, not to have a data center create for them.

In addition, many apps snarf up your words and use them to train their AI models, after having ingested your published books. Again, Literature & Latte addresses this: “Scrivener does not do anything with your text in the background that would cause it to be sent anywhere from your machine to any other server.”

Unlike web apps like Google Docs or Office 365, everything you write in your Scrivener projects stays on your device. You may sync your Scrivener projects via a cloud service such as Dropbox, iCloud, or OneDrive, so you can access them on multiple devices. But Scrivener itself does nothing with the text in your projects. (See Dropbox AI Principles, Apple Intelligence and privacy on Mac, and Privacy, security, and compliance in Microsoft OneDrive for information on how these services treat your personal data.)

But I’ve seen AI prompts in Scrivener…

If you use Scrivener on a Mac running macOS 15 Sequoia or macOS 26 Tahoe, these versions of the Apple operating system contain Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI tools that are available in every app. (Apple changed the naming of its operating systems in 2025 to use the coming year, so macOS 15 was released in 2024, and macOS 26 in 2025.) Even though Scrivener doesn’t use any sort of AI, there’s no way to exclude these features from the app.

You may see an icon like this in the border of Scrivener’s Editor next to selected text. It looks a lot like the icons of generative AI apps:

It is the Apple Intelligence writing tools icon. Click it, and you see this menu:

As the menu shows, you can use these tools to proofread or rewrite texts, summarize them, make a list of key points, and more. The Compose item at the bottom of the menu lets you ask ChatGPT to create new texts. Surely, you don’t want to do this in your manuscript…

These tools are also available in any Mac app by choosing Edit > Writing Tools. You may recall earlier versions of Scrivener having a Writing Tools submenu in the Edit menu. This allowed you to look up words, search the web, or use Scrivener’s name generator, which is described in How to Manage Your Characters in Scrivener. These Scrivener features have been moved, because of the new Apple menu, and now appear in Edit > Reference tools.

What about Scrivener on iPad or iPhone?

Same deal; Apple Intelligence will rear its head on those devices as well. The menu is a bit different, but the feature set is the same.

How can I get rid of Apple’s AI prompts in Scrivener?

As mentioned above, Scrivener cannot exclude these tools from the app. But you can turn off Apple Intelligence on a Mac running macOS 15 Sequoia or macOS 26 Tahoe, or on an iPhone or iPad running versions 18 or 26 of iOS or iPadOS.

On a Mac, go to the Apple menu, then choose System Settings. Click Apple Intelligence & Siri in the sidebar, then toggle off Apple Intelligence.

On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings, tap Apple Intelligence & Siri, then turn off Apple Intelligence.

Turning this feature off globally turns off many useful features, such as message and phone call translations, Image Playground and Genmoji, webpage summaries in Safari, and notification summaries. Many of these tools are useful, and don’t use generative AI – that is, AI that creates – but use AI to summarize texts or alter images.

If you want to use these Apple Intelligence features, you can just ignore the occasional prompts in Scrivener. And remember that Scrivener is there for you to write, to create, to use your imagination. Not to have some machine write for you.

While Scrivener is the ideal app for writing long-form projects, it’s also a great way to write and manage collections of shorter works. You can use Scrivener for poetry projects, for blogging, and you can also use Scrivener to write and organize collections of short stories or essays. Here’s how.

Setting up Scrivener’s Binder for short stories or essays

Scrivener has about two dozen templates that you can use, each designed for different types of projects. When you choose File > New Project, you see the Template Chooser. Click Fiction, choose Short Story, then click Create. Name the project, and when you open it, it looks something like this:

This project is ideal for any collection of short writing: stories, essays, flash fiction, or novellas. The Short Story Manuscript Format document at the top of the Binder tells you a bit about this project and how you can use it.

All Scrivener projects work the same, and you can learn about ways to use the Binder to organize your project in this article. For short stories or essays, there are two ways you can work in the Binder.

The first is to create individual files in the Manuscript folder for each story. This template has one file, labeled Scene. If you want to write each story in a file, you can work in this existing file, renaming it, and you can create new files by choosing Project > New Text.

Another method is to create a folder for each story. This allows you to build stories with multiple documents, one for each scene or section. You can add folders by choosing Project > New Folder, then add new text files to each folder. This approach looks something like this:

As you work, you can leverage all of Scrivener’s features, such as using its Research folder to store notes and background information, tracking word counts, statistics, and targets, and to really focus on your writing, you can use some of Scrivener’s features for distraction-free writing.

Revising and editing short stories or essays

When you reach the revision and editing stage, you have many ways to work with your stories or essays. When you begin revising or editing files, you should take snapshots. These are backups of individual files, and this allows you to go back to older versions if you want to revert any changes or edits you’ve made to them.

Scrivener’s revision mode can help you as you edit your files. And as you read through edited versions of your stories or essays, you can add annotations and comments to make notes about changes you want to make.

Sequencing a short story or essay collection

When creating a collection of short stories or essays, it’s important to put them in an order that creates a compelling reading experience. This could involve alternating different story types, or arranging them so the reading experience builds as the collection progresses. You might want to arrange essays in chronological order or arrange them by theme or topic.

Use the Synopsis field in Scrivener’s Inspector to write a short description of each story or essay. This makes it easy to view the sequence of your collection in Scrivener’s Outliner and Corkboard. You can rearrange the order of your stories or essays by dragging them in either of these interfaces.

You can then use Scrivenings mode to read through the entire collection to see how the it flows.

Managing a short story or essay collection

Managing your collection involves keeping track of the state of each text (first draft, revised, final draft, etc.), and you can do this using Scrivener’s Status marks. You can also use labels to mark them, indicating their state of completion, revision, or submission.

And if you write a lot of stories or essays, you can set up a submission tracker in Scrivener, leveraging labels and status marks, and adding custom metadata to track each item’s state.

Compiling a short story or essay collection

Compiling is the final stage of preparing your collection. You compile your project before sending it to a critique partner, agent, or editor. Scrivener stitches together all your stories or essays in one document, either a text file in one of many formats, or a PDF.

The Short Story template includes some compile settings specific to this type of project. To compile your collection, it helps to assign section types to your project. You can access this in Project > Project Settings:

You access the Compile screen by choosing File > Compile. As you can see in the sidebar in the screenshot below, there are two Short Story formats in the Compile screen. After you’ve set up the Short Story section type, click the popup next to each story folder in the right hand pane of the Compile screen and assign that section type:

This tells Scrivener that each folder in the above example is a story and each file within those folders is a part of that story. When compiling, Scrivener then knows to put these items together, with page breaks before each story.

If you’re preparing a short story or essay collection for publication, Scrivener can compile it in an ebook format. This process allows you to add a cover, front matter, metadata, and more, to produce a deliverable ebook file that you can upload to retailers.

While there’s not much difference working with short stories or essays compared with, say, a novel or non-fiction book, some of Scrivener’s features, and its specific short story template, make the process a bit easier.

Show notes:

• Alexander Rose
• Phantom Fleet: The Hunt for Nazi Submarine U–505 and World War II’s Most Daring Heist
• Washington’s Spies
• Spionage (Alexander’s Rose’s Substack)
• Voltaire: history of Charles XII, King of Sweden

Learn more about Scrivener, and check out the ebook Take Control of Scrivener.

If you like the podcast, please follow it on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Leave a rating or review, and tell your friends. And check out past episodes of Write Now with Scrivener.

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Alexander Rose is a historian whose latest book, Phantom Fleet, is about how the US Navy captured a German U-Boat on the day before D-Day.

Alex Rose was born in the United States, grew up in Australia, was educated in Britain, worked in Canada, and now lives in New York. This gives him an interesting perspective on the world, an “outsider’s perspective in a way, even though, theoretically speaking, I’m an insider. I learned how to write in the British tradition of history writing rather than the American tradition of history writing. So even while I write books that are American-based, there’s a British writing style involved with it.”

How do they differ? “I think there’s traditionally in Britain an emphasis on, it sounds odd, but adding jokes. There’s a greater appreciation of irony than in America. There’s generally an emphasis on being much more serious and much more fact-based, much drier in a way. So there’s not as much fun involved in writing [in American style] as there is in the British or Australian styles.”

There are two types of fiction writers: planner and pantser. A planner outlines their novel, and a pantser just starts writing with no plan in mind. I asked Alex how he plans a book of history. “What I tend to do is I tend to work chapter by chapter. I know some of the high points that I want to hit in the chapter, and then I construct it section by section. It’s almost like constructing a screenplay, scene by scene. I tend to think about where I’m going in the chapter. As I go on, it becomes a little clearer, the road ahead to the next chapter. And then the chapter after that. I’m a bit of a planner, but mostly I’d say 70% pantser.”

Alex pointed out that he thinks of his books in the three-act structure that novelists and screenwriters often use. “You usually know where you’re going to start. And you kind of know where you’re going to end; you know, more or less, this is the climax. I’ve got to get to that. But act two is always where the complications are. And if you haven’t thought about it at all, that’s where things become woolly and you can go off in strange directions.”

Having written screenplays for the TV adaptation of his first book, Washington’s Spies (renamed Turn: Washington’s Spies for TV), Alex applies similar storytelling techniques to his books. “There are certain techniques you can take from the movies about the Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 structure. History is like writing fiction in that there is an art to it. It is not just a recitation of dry facts one after another. That just leads to kind of plodding, tedious narratives that go strictly from day one to the last day. There’s an art and style to history writing.”

Alex’s latest book, Phantom Fleet, The Hunt for Nazi Submarine U–505, and World War II’s Most Daring Heist, sounds a bit like a Tom Clancy novel: the US Navy tracked and captured a German submarine just before D-Day. He told me that it’s an action-oriented story. “I didn’t want to just tell the story of the heisting of this submarine at sea. You have to go into the background of it, and how they got there in the first place. How did all of these people meet in the middle of the South Atlantic at a seemingly random point and just take a submarine? These things are in gestation for several years. You have to go to the background of Enigma and Anglo-American military cooperation and submarine hunting and anti-submarine war. There’s a lot of other contextual stuff that goes into this that all leads up to that critical moment on June 4, 1944, when they get the submarine.”

Alex has written four books with Scrivener so far. He has far too many research documents to store in Scrivener and uses DevonThink for the thousands of scans and PDFs for each book. “I use Scrivener for writing, organization, and note-taking.”

I suggested that his pantser approach means that he makes a lot of changes as he writes a book. “I organize it within the Corkboard. I move index cards around a lot. Sometimes when you’re writing a book, you go down blind alleys. In Phantom Fleet, I had a whole chapter on Enigma, because Enigma is much more complex and much more interesting than people think. So you just delete things. But that’s what words are for. You write them, and then you decide, ‘this isn’t going to work here.’ You can’t use everything that you research and investigate. So again, Scrivener is very useful. You don’t have to delete anything, really. You just move it into a different folder.”

Other Scrivener features that Alex uses include using multiple windows, splitting the Editor, and “being able to add footnotes is incredibly useful for history writers. It’s the only software on the market that can actually do all this, that’s built specifically – for me at least – for these kinds of tasks.”

If you write a novel with multiple point-of-view characters or multiple timelines, it’s important to be able to keep track of each section of your story as you progress. As you shift from one element to another, you need to make sure that each part of your narrative flows correctly. Scrivener’s Corkboard, together with labels that you can apply to each of your files, give you a bird’s eye view of your plot, and helps you ensure the coherence of complex stories.

Working with multiple point-of-view characters

Multiple point-of-view characters allow authors to tell a story from different perspectives. Multiple point-of-view characters are often used in romance novels, fantasy, and thrillers. In many cases, there are two or three point-of-view characters, but there can be more.

Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, for example, has two narrators: one is an omniscient third-person narrator, and the other narrative is in first person told by the protagonist Esther Summerson. Kathryn Stockett’s The Help is told by three first-person narrators, showing the difference between a family and its domestic worker, with a third character, a friend of the protagonist, offering an outsider’s perspective.

One extreme example of multiple point-of-view characters is George R.R. Martin’s novel, A Game of Thrones. The novel has eight point-of-view characters, with each chapter shifting from one character to another. These changes in point-of-view characters do not occur in a specific order, and, for an author writing this sort of novel, it’s important to keep track of when each character is speaking and how events in their chapters fit into the narrative.

Use labels to mark scenes or chapters

If you work with multiple point-of-view characters, it’s a good idea to mark their scenes or chapters with labels. I’ve made a sample Scrivener project with all the chapters of A Game of Thrones, named as they are in the novel: the point-of-view character’s name followed by the Roman numeral of their appearance in the story. I’ve set up labels for each character, and chosen to display them in the Binder and as Binder icons. These labels immediately show the complexity of this approach.

(5 Tips for Using Labels in Scrivener looks at using labels, and discusses how to apply them. )

While these labels are useful in the Binder to highlight which character is the focus of each chapter, they become much more powerful when you switch to the Corkboard. By default, the Corkboard looks like this. (I’ve made the cards very small to fit as many as possible in the window.)

If you click the Arrange by Label button (in the red circle in the screenshot above), the Corkboard changes to position each file on a line according to its label.

Each label line shows the chapters for a single point-of-view character, and the overall timeline, from left to right, shows the linear progression through the novel. As you scroll sideways, you can see when and how often the various point-of-view characters appear in the story. When writing a novel like this, you can use this view to make sure that each character appears often enough, and that their chapters aren’t too close together.

Work with multiple timelines

Multiple timelines are also used frequently in fiction. Some examples are The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier, where two characters 400 years apart are contrasted; All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, where there are two timelines and two point-of-view characters; and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, which hops back and forth between the present and many pasts.

One of the most common ways multiple timelines are used is to intersperse chapters set in the present time with flashbacks. A character may interact with others in the present, and then reflect on events in the past to show how past events affect the character. In this approach, each timeline generally progresses chronologically, but doesn’t have to.

Managing multiple timelines is similar to working with multiple point-of-view characters. You can apply labels for, say, present and past, and view them in the Corkboard as above. If you have multiple past periods that you want to tag, you can create more labels. For example, you may have a character whose past is shown in childhood, adolescence, and as an adult, and you can tag each of these periods. Or the timelines could correspond to locations where characters were through their lives, with different labels used to tag different locations.

Another way to manage multiple timelines is to use status. By default, Scrivener provides status set up to mark the state of your chapters: First Draft, In Progress, Final Draft, etc. But just as with labels, you can create your own statuses. (We explain how to do this in Three Ways to Mark the Status of Items in Your Scrivener Project).

To display Status Stamps on the cards in the Corkboard, choose View > Corkboard Options > Show Status Stamps. These status stamps can help you get an overview of a novel with a single point-of-view character, letting you see how often you switch timelines. And if you use this with multiple point-of-view characters, marked by labels, this feature becomes even more powerful.

Working with multiple point-of-view characters or timelines can be demanding, but this approach can enrich a narrative by keeping readers on their toes. These approaches allow authors to tell stories in unconventional ways, and Scrivener can help you organize this type of project when outlining and a s you write.

In How to Add Custom Metadata to the Scrivener Inspector, we looked at how to add custom metadata to your Scrivener projects. This is additional information you can add to your files to help you sort, search, and filter your project.

In this article, we’ll look at one application of using custom metadata: how you can use it to manage characters.

Working with lots of characters

Some novels only have a few characters, but some may have dozens. Many fantasy novels can have a dozen main characters and many more minor characters. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series has more than one hundred characters, with some three dozen point of view characters across the series. In addition, they are organized in houses, and it can be helpful to have information about these characters handy when viewing scenes and chapters.

Some mysteries also have a lot of characters. Many whodunits have minor characters who aren’t considered as suspects, but think of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, where there are 13 suspects who appear individually or with other characters as the book progresses. When writing a novel like this, you need to keep track of when the suspects appear and what they say.

With this many characters, you probably prepare an outline before you start. It can be helpful to add custom metadata to each of your chapters so you know which characters appear when, and to ensure that the story moves from character to character. In novels with fewer characters, you might want to use custom metadata to keep track of multiple timelines or character arcs.

You can create lists for metadata with character names; you click a list and choose, say, which POV character is in a chapter. You can also use open text fields, where you can add anything you want. You could add multiple character names, or a character and a description of their state in a given chapter.

How to work with custom metadata

Custom metadata fields let you add data to files that go beyond Scrivener’s file titles, synopses, labels, and status markers. You can view custom metadata in the Inspector’s metadata tab, and as columns in the Outliner.

There are four types of custom metadata: Text, Checkbox, List, and Date fields. You access these from the Project > Project Settings > Custom Metadata pane.

You can use custom metadata in several ways:

• You can create text fields for any information you want to track, such as character names, locations, or events.
• You can use list fields where you choose from a preset list. You can use these for POV characters, character roles (protagonist or antagonist; investigator or suspect), locations, or events that take place in the narrative. Or, if your novel spans a long period of time, you might want to add a field for each character’s age so you know where you are in your overall timeline.
• You can use checkbox fields to track character development milestones, such as when a character performs certain actions that are important in the plot.
• And you can use date fields to mark events in a long timeline.

Once you’ve defined the custom metadata fields in your project, you can fill them out for each element in your Binder. If you create custom character sheets for your project, you can include custom metadata in these document templates, and you can choose the appropriate template when adding a new character.

How to leverage custom metadata in your Scrivener projects

You can always view the custom metadata for any file in the Inspector if the Metadata icon is selected. But you can use custom metadata in ways that allow you to search project, finding all files with specific metadata.

One way of doing this is through collections. A collection is a search of the project according to any criteria you want. You could search for the name of a character, a location, a word or phrase, or anything in your project, but you can also constrain your search to only look for custom metadata.

Click in the search field, then click the small magnifying glass and look in the second section of the dropdown menu. This is where the custom metadata that you’ve set up appears.

Select one of these, then type the word you want to search for in that type of custom metadata.

You can save these searches so you can access their results quickly. You could search for each of your custom metadata entries and save each collection. As you progress in your project and add new files, displaying the collection includes those added files. To view all your collections, choose View > Show Collections.

For more on working with collections, see How to Use Scrivener’s Collections to Access Groups of Files or Search Results Quickly.

View custom metadata in Scrivener’s Outliner

Scrivener’s Outliner lets you choose from a number of columns to display. When using the Outliner, you may only display the title, the synopsis, and perhaps the status of each file and its word count. When you define custom metadata, the Outliner makes new columns available according to that metadata. Click the > icon at the top right of the Outliner, and you’ll see your custom metadata near the bottom of the menu.

Check any item to display it as a column in the Outliner. Here, I’ve chosen to display the POV Character and Location metadata items. This allows you to see, at a glance, which characters and locations are used in the files.

This article only scratches the surface of using custom metadata to manage characters in Scrivener projects. Any information you want attached to your files about your characters can be set up as custom metadata. While most projects don’t need this extra information, you may find it invaluable if you have lots of characters in your project.

November is a good time of year to focus on your writing and set a goal. The days are shorter and the weather is cooler, at least if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere. A good target to aim for is 50,000 words: this is the length of a short novel or a long novella. With 30 days in the month, you can hit this target if you write an average of 1,667 words per day. This may seem like a lot, but your goal is to write a first draft, not a polished manuscript; that word count is attainable with a bit of planning.

Here are some tips for reaching 50,000 words this November with Scrivener.

Plan ahead

To hit the ground running, do some prep work before November begins. You could plan your project with Scrivener’s Outliner or use Scrivener’s Corkboard. You don’t need to plan it in detail; you may not even need to outline it; many writers don’t use outlines at all. But you should have a good idea of where you want the story to go, at least for its first act. One good way to prepare is to use the Save the Cat! method of outlining your novel, but any structural overview will help you know where you’re going, even if you don’t know how your story will end.

Set a writing routine

You most likely need to fit your writing into your existing schedule, and you should block out time to hit your word count. Many writers find that it’s easier to write when they develop a consistent rhythm. This could mean getting up early and writing for an hour every morning before work or school, or writing in the evening when you get home. While writing every day is the best way to develop a routine, you may not hit your target each day. You can catch up on weekends when you have a bit more time. Don’t be too rigid with your daily word count and focus on the final target.

Use Scrivener’s statistics and targets to stay motivated

Scrivener can show your word count as you write, and you can set targets for each writing session, or for each document in the Binder. Hitting these targets daily can help you maintain motivation, and watching the word count increase as you approach your monthly goal can spur you on in the final stretch.

Don’t aim for perfection

The goal is not to write a finished 50,000-word novel in one month; it’s to write 50,000 words and make progress toward a novel. Some novels may be around 50,000 words, and for others, this may be the framework for a project that will expand as you revise it. You shouldn’t try to create a polished manuscript; your goal is to get words on (virtual) paper so you can edit and revise later. Don’t worry if your grammar isn’t perfect, if you don’t find the right verb for every sentence, or even if you don’t write every scene. There’s plenty of time later to refine and perfect your work.

Write out of order when inspiration strikes

One advantage of using Scrivener is that the app’s Binder lets you write out of order. You can set the Binder up in a way that matches your style, and, if you plan ahead, you can write scenes and chapters when you’re inspired. Even if you haven’t outlined your entire novel, you’ll have some scenes in mind that you can write when you’re motivated. If you have multiple timelines or point-of-view characters, you can keep writing one of those threads even if you haven’t written the alternating scenes or chapters.

Write in short bursts and take breaks

Just as when you go to the gym, and take breaks after a certain number of reps on weight machines, you need to take breaks when writing. Use short writing periods where you block out everything and think about nothing but writing. During these periods, focus on getting words down without worrying about quality. This is especially effective when your time is limited. One way to do this is to use the Pomodoro Technique, where you write for 25 minutes, then take 5-minute breaks. You can do two sessions in an hour, with a break for coffee or tea, each morning.

Use writing prompts to get you started

No matter how well you develop a writing routine or schedule, you will get stuck at times. When you need a boost, try using writing prompts. These prompts may have nothing to do with your story, but you can use them as warm-up routines, like stretching your creative muscles, to get your mind into the right state to get words down. Spending ten minutes writing about something unrelated to your story can help your mind get into its creative mode.

Plan for obstacles

You won’t hit your word count every day. You’ll have unplanned obstacles, such as work or family responsibilities, or, if you’re in the US, there’s Thanksgiving weekend near the end of the month. Plan for these hurdles: try to get more than your daily minimum word count each day so you can take days off when needed. If you have an extended Thanksgiving holiday, you may be able to write while traveling or catch up on the weekend.

Don’t feel bad if you don’t reach 50,000 words

The problem with a 50,000-word target is that you may feel like you’ve failed if you don’t hit that word count. No matter how much you write, you’ve won your gamble: you’ve planned a novel, started to develop a writing routine, and seen how things can get in the way. This is what happens to all writers. Even if you reach only half of your target, there’s no reason to stop at the end of November. If you want to hit 50,000 words, keep writing.

Scrivener’s projects contain the text you write along with background material and research. One of the folders in the Scrivener Binder is labelled Characters, and is designed to hold pre-formatted character sketches. These files let you store information about your characters, and contain a number of sections to help you organize this information.

But these character sketches may not be sufficient for your project, and you may want to flesh out your characters in detail before writing. Scrivener lets you create custom document templates that you can use for characters, and you can even create cascading character templates so you can create new file groups as character sheets quickly.

The basics of Scrivener’s Character Sketches

In How to Manage Your Characters in Scrivener, we discuss how Scrivener’s character sketches work. These simple documents have a number of headers allowing you to jot down basic elements about your characters.

While the headers in these documents guide you in suggesting elements to describe your characters, you’re free to add any notes you want in these character sketches. If you don’t like the way they are set up, you can create your own document templates with layouts and headers that are more adapted to your project. (See How to Create and Use Custom Document Templates in Scrivener.)

You could make these character sketches much more comprehensive, with sections for basic information, physical descriptions, personality traits, backstory, character arcs, and relationships.

Using multiple Character folders with different character sketches

Some people write books with just a few characters, and others may have hundreds. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series has some 2,000 named characters, divided among “houses,” and the relationships between characters are complex. If you were writing this sort of novel, you might want separate Characters folders for each house; or for a space opera, one folder for each planet. If you’re writing a biography or a historical novel, you may also want to separate characters into folders to make them easier to manage. Or you may simply want to have different character sketches for major and minor characters.

If you do this, you can create custom character sketch documents and choose the appropriate template when you create a new character sketch, so it contains the appropriate fields. You can pre-fill some of the sections of these documents, specifying which house or group they belong to. You can create these new documents by clicking the + icon in the toolbar and choosing a template, or by choosing Project > New from Template, then choosing a template.

Use cascading character sketches for more complex characters

In some cases, you may want to store more information about your characters than you can fit in a single character sheet. You may want to have character sheets that cover the basics, but you may also want to fill out your characters’ backstory, discuss their personality traits, go into detail about their appearance, and, in complex stories, note their relationships with other characters. George R.R. Martin most likely compiled a bible for his fiction series; a long document that lists every character, location, event, and relationship between characters. Because when you’re writing the fifth 800-page novel with hundreds of characters, it’s easy to forget what happened in the first volume.

You’re used to seeing files in Scrivener’s Binder in folders, and this is the standard way you organize your project. But Scrivener also uses file groups, which are files that contain other files. You can see how this works by dragging any file onto another file; the second file shows as a child of the first file, indented in the Binder. You can see this below, where one scene is a child document of another scene in Chapter 4 of a project.

In How to Create and Use Custom Document Templates in Scrivener, you can see how to create your own custom character sketches. Scrivener treats any file you place in its Template Sheets folder – whether it’s on its own or is a file group – as a template that you can use.

So if you want to have character sketches with multiple subdocuments, you can set up a file group like this and place it in your Template Sheets folder:

When choosing to add a document template, this file group will show up in the + menu in the toolbar and in the Project > New from Template menu. In addition, you have the option to choose the entire file group to add to your project or any of its subdocuments.

Just as you can make multiple basic character sketch templates, you can also create as many cascading character sketch templates as you want. You could, using the George R.R. Martin example, set up one file group for each house, with different subdocuments according to what is appropriate for each type of character. Each template could contain pre-filled information about the house as a reminder, and have unique section headers or any other information that is helpful as you build your roster of characters.

If you create many character sketch templates, you could use custom icons on them to help tell them apart when choosing them from a menu. See Personalize the Scrivener Binder with Custom Icons to learn how to do this.

Character sketches are useful if you want to store information about your characters, especially if your book is populated with dozens or hundreds of characters. These advanced character templates give you infinite flexibility in the type of information you store about each character.