Scrivener

While Scrivener’s Research folder is marvellous for keeping reference material alongside your writing, you can end up a huge project. Large files slow everything down and make it less stable. In this post, I’ll explain how you can create bookmarks to link to existing files elsewhere, rather than copying them to your project. What are Scrivener bookmarks? There are three types of bookmark in Scrivener: Internal: this is just a pointer to another document within your Scrivener project (I’m not going to cover this one). External: a URL for a webpage or a local file. External file: a link to a file that’s stored on your computer. You can create them for specific documents, or for your entire project. Project bookmarks are useful for documents like style guides that you need to refer to repeatedly. ...

As you’ve no doubt discovered, writing is much easier when you have all your notes and research material to hand. This is one of the many reasons I love Scrivener, as the Research folder helps me keep everything together and display it alongside my writing. The split screen feature means I can easily refer to a journal article as I work, and also quickly copy across the quotes that I’m discussing. ...

Writing a book or a thesis involves seemingly endless revisions and it can be very difficult to keep track of them. Also, constant tinkering doesn’t always improve matters. With Scrivener you can take a Snapshot of your current document before editing and then revert or roll back to the original version if it ends up looking worse. I really struggled with the word count in my thesis (it was around 20,000 too many), so Snapshots helped me experiment with removing quotes and peripheral arguments. Sometimes the impact was too great in later chapters, so I was able to roll back to the original version. ...

The Scratchpad might sound like something your cat would use, but it’s actually a very handy feature in Scrivener. Sometimes our writing can be interrupted by random thoughts; sometimes they’re even useful. With the Scratchpad you can quickly jot them down in a pop-up window and return to the task in hand. It’s not linked to any particular document so is perfect for anything that isn’t obviously related to your current project. The Scratchpad also works outside Scrivener, although it needs to be running in the background. As the Scratchpad floats freely, you can place it alongside any other application. This makes it ideal for taking notes while you’re reading online. ...

Mindmapping software can often feel overly rigid and complicated for capturing ideas quickly. Scapple, from the makers of the brilliant Scrivener, is a free-form, non-linear application for capturing your thoughts. It’s the closest software can get to a piece of paper and a pen – but you never run out of space. Scapple is available for both Mac and Windows. I’m basing this post on the Mac version, but it works broadly the same on both platforms. ...

Around 10 years ago, I wrote a tutorial on using Zotero with Scrivener through the RTF/ODF plugin. This method was fiddly, but ultimately produced live Zotero citations in a Word or OpenOffice document. When Zotero 7 was launched, this method no longer worked. I updated my tutorial with a doom-laden reflection on why this problem was unlikely to be solved. Happily, the developers of the original plugin have not only updated it but also made it much better than the original. It’s now called ODF/DOCX Scan for Zotero. I’m grateful to Sebastian Karcher and the other volunteers for all their work and also to Professor Michael Cantinotti for alerting me to the update. ...

Although being a 21st-century researcher has its challenges, we are at least blessed with some excellent tools. Scrivener and Zotero are two of the best. This dream team makes it much easier to plan and draft your writing, then add citations and bibliographies in the right format. Unfortunately, the two tools aren’t directly integrated. This means finding workarounds and making compromises. In a pair of blog posts, I’ll explain two approaches - one simple, one more complicated - so you can decide what’s right for you. ...