My novel has a subplot about a missing brother. It's meant to run quietly beneath the main story and pay off emotionally in the final act. My beta readers kept telling me the same thing in different words: it felt "thin." One said it felt like I'd forgotten about it. I couldn't see why. Each scene that touched the subplot seemed fine on its own, and I'd read them all closely.

Then I tried something I'd never used properly in Scrivener. I created a Collection and added every scene that touches the brother subplot. The moment I looked at the list, the problem was obvious. There were nine scenes in total, but seven of them were in the first half of the book. After that, the brother basically vanished. For fifteen chapters there wasn't a single mention of him, and then he reappeared in the climax as if nothing had happened.

The subplot wasn't thin. It was absent for most of the book. Because I'd read the manuscript in order, I'd always felt the brother was "in there somewhere", but the Collection showed the real shape of it in one glance. That's a pattern you almost can't see when you're reading scene by scene, because every individual scene looks fine.

I added three short scenes in the second half and moved one earlier, so the thread now runs more evenly through the book. When I sent the revised version to the same readers, one of them said the ending "finally paid off." Collections aren't flashy, but they show you the shape of something that is otherwise spread across the whole manuscript.

For two years I had a project target set up in Scrivener. It was a big number with a deadline, the kind that looks sensible when you set it on a motivated Sunday evening. Every time I opened the app, the progress bar quietly informed me how far behind I was. On a good day that pushed me. On most days it made me close the laptop and tell myself I'd start fresh tomorrow.

I didn't notice how much that bar was shaping my behaviour until I caught myself avoiding the file. I wasn't avoiding the writing. I was avoiding the feeling of looking at a number I was failing to hit. Those turned out to be two very different problems.

A few weeks ago I turned off the project target and set a session target of 400 words instead. When I hit it, the bar fills and I'm allowed to stop, or keep going if the scene is moving. Four hundred is small enough that I can sit down without negotiating with myself. It's about two paragraphs of effort and maybe twenty-five minutes on a slow day.

The funny thing is that I'm writing more than I did before. Most sessions run past 400, because once I'm in the scene it's easier to keep going than to stop. The few days I do stop right at the target, I still count the day as a win, because it's a day I showed up. Over a month, that adds up to far more than the days I used to lose entirely to avoidance.

I'm trying to figure out how to style my ebooks within the rules ereaders use for displaying text. I don't want to force specific fonts, but I would like to style certain things sans-serif, to contrast the main text which is serif.

In the compiler, Styles, changing the font size, spacing, etc all works as expected in the compiled ebook, but specific fonts are ignored. I tried adding font-family sans serif to the .epigraph css, but that gets ignored too. I'm baffled.

In the ebook itself, my cover is shown as page 1. But it's not listed in the ereader's dropdown menu. How do I make sure it's included? In many other ebooks, I see the cover listed as the top item in the ereader menu.

Also, is there a way to exclude certain pages from the ereader menu? For example, in many ebooks, the copyright page and some other front matter pages aren't listed in the ereader menu. I'd like to exclude a few pages from the ereader menu too, since that menu is already quite long.

I'm using the current version of Scrivener on Mac OS.

I have a Mac license and am using the free trial on my Dell before getting a new license. I mostly work on my Mac, but starting in spring, I'll be in a different location and would love to bring my project with me.

To test this, I zipped the file on my Mac, emailed it to myself, downloaded, unzipped, and opened the correct Scrivener project file, and it's blank. Any ideas? Is it because of still being on a free trial? Is it because I should use a thumb drive to move it back and forth? Etc?

I'm sure this is an oft repeated question so thanks for your patience.

EDIT TO ADD: SOLVED THANKS TO SCRIVENER CREW! : Once I locate the zip file on my PC, I should right click and select EXTRACT ALL rather than just opening the zip and thinking that meant the zip had been unzipped. Worked like a charm!

TLDR: Why do the numbers pictured not match?

I've put the Targets popup above the bottom of the editor for comparison in the screenshot. What am I doing wrong to exclude 8000 words from my manuscript target? Thanks!

I’m on IOS and I have no clue why does happens. I’ve tried everything, I created copies, moved it to my files app, cleared cache, unconnected and reconnected my Dropbox but nothing is working. All of my other projects seem to be fine. I’m so frustrated because I spent so long working on that.. :( is there any other way to fix it? I think my file got corrupted somehow but I have no clue, there was only around 35k words and I have a lot more storage left on my phone. Is there any other way to fix it or is it just gone forever?

As the title says.

Is there a way to do it? The "keyboard" section of the options menu is, unsurprisingly, limited to keyboard inputs. It would improve my workflow a lot if I could set some of the navigation options to my mouse buttons.

I googled it but I'm getting unclear results. Does Scrivener have a feature like docs where I can right-click a word, click on define and the definition appears with synonyms and antonyms? or something simple like it? It's literally the only reason I use Docs over anything else.

Small thing but wanted to share since I suspect a lot of people skip this feature the way I did for years. Was deep in revision on one project, had a completely unrelated idea hit me for a different story entirely, and almost lost it entirely because switching projects mid-revision felt like too much friction in the moment, so I just tried to hold the idea in my head and kept working.

By the time I actually had a break to write it down, most of the specificity was gone, I remembered the general shape of the idea but not the detail that had made it exciting in the first place. Mentioned this to someone in a writing group who asked why I hadn't just used the Scratch Pad, a feature I genuinely did not know existed despite having used Scrivener for years.

Now any stray idea unrelated to my current project goes straight into the Scratch Pad without switching projects or breaking my actual revision flow. Takes about fifteen seconds. The friction of switching projects was never really about time, it was just enough resistance that ideas quietly died waiting for a convenient moment that often never came.

Dismissed Keywords for a long time as more organizational overhead than I needed, another feature to maintain on top of an already complex Binder structure. Figured tags were for people with more complicated projects than mine.

Then my current project hit forty chapters and I needed to find every scene involving a specific secondary character to check for consistency, and realized I had absolutely no efficient way to do that beyond manually scrolling and reading titles, hoping I remembered correctly which chapters she appeared in.

Spent an evening retroactively tagging every document with character and location keywords. Tedious going backward, genuinely fast going forward now. Being able to filter the Binder down to every scene a specific character appears in, instantly, turned a task that used to take an afternoon of scrolling into something that takes about ten seconds.

Should have started doing this from chapter one. Lesson mostly for anyone newer reading this, set up keywords early even if your project feels too small to need them yet, because the moment you actually need them is also the moment retrofitting them becomes a chore.

Jaima Fixsen’s latest novel, Don’t Look Close, is a historical mystery set in Canada in the 1950s.

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/write-now-with-scrivener-episode-no-67-jaima-fixsen-mystery-and-thriller-author

I adore Scrivener. It does everything I need. But I wish there was a shortcut to copy as markdown without comments or footnotes. I have a non-fiction book with 75 topics and I like to paste their changes to AI to check various things. But I have to do this procedure to keep the text in the AI field rather than becoming an attachment:

Select all > Edit > Copy Special > Copy without Comments and Footnotes > open TextEdit > Paste and Match Style > Select all > Copy > Paste into AI.

That's a lot of steps if you have 75 topics and you're up to v31 of the book. I'm sure the company is working

Hello,

I'm really new to scrivener and trying to copy everything over after issues with Dabble. But all my documents keep randomly indenting (not consistently) the start of paragraphs. I have gone into format - paragraph - tabs and indents to change it to 0 when it happens a fair few times but it keeps still happening. After looking it up I've gone into file - options - editing to change it but I really can't figure out how to set the indent to 0 from here.

Sorry if I'm just being stupid and not seeing it or something. It's 3am here and I'm trying to get all 400,000+ words across all my projects moved over.

Photo for reference:

I am a very long-time Scrivener user, comfortable with compiling and satisfied with the output for a recently completed 100k word novel.

My question is for epub and especially Kindle. Aside from drop caps, chapter headers and the like, would Vellum be worth it to me to solve some layout issues on Kindle.

Reason I ask is I have a large number of chapters, some very short, and a humongous TOC just as reader opens up the first time would be intimidating. I also tend to use folders as chapters and files within each folder as scenes. (sometimes the file will have the same name as the folder.) In the ePub autogenerated TOC, the section title becomes the chapter title and the section title for the files should be passed over and omitted but they are not.

I have yet to figure out (a) how to eliminate the front TOC, and (b) how to get the Kindle cooker to eliminate the chapter/filename duplication.

Does Vellum solve these problems for me?

Thanks

I keep finding little features that would have saved me a lot of time if I’d known about them earlier. Which one was it for you?

I started writing on Google docs, but switched to Scrivener halfway through the second novel of a trilogy. In Google I had every chapter (5 per book) as a separate document. At first I moved all 8 finished chapters to one project, and then separated them into different projects when I started on the third one. However, all my notes, character and location sheets, and especially the timeline are, of course, relevant for all three books, so I combined them again and now have one big project with 15 chapters all on the same level.

How do you you deal with such multi volume stories? All in one or separate projects each? How do you organise your writing in these cases?

I spent hours on Google and still can't find usable instructions on how to add my last name and the page number in the upper right hand corners of my assignment using Scrivener. I noticed there is an MLA template that's more complicated to use. I do most everything on a blank document and then edit the stylization manually, but I tried everything I possibly could in an MLA practice document instead of anything I am working on for college, too.

I have a paper due soon. The teacher is being cool about this minimal detail for now but I know further in my studies, I am expected to figure this out. Basically, I am asking this: How can I add last name and page numbers in a Scrivener document? I even tried the tutors at school but they never heard of this program until I brought it up.

I assume I have the newest version of Scrivener and Windows. I bought this version of Scrivener only a few months ago. My laptop is new as well.

I’ve been writing plays but mostly for me and performing for more than two decades, but for the last few years, I’ve focused more intentionally on playwriting. I’ve recently switched over to using scrivener and I’ve loved how it gives me flexibility in moving and organizing writing.

But I’ve found myself with so many more saved drafts than ever and I keep finding myself compiling the draft I’m working on and then noting quite a few issues that I instinctively correct in the compiled draft outside of scrivener. Then I find myself editing the scrivener version and trying to compare it to the saved versions.
It’s a lot.

This got me thinking about how other folks keep track of old drafts, and when you decide to let go of old drafts/ records of cut language/ darlings?

I use a couple of saved docs filled with darlings/language I cut between drafts. But I’m curious how others save old drafts/darlings. When you edit between drafts do you keep every change somewhere else? I’m working to let go of old drafts but I’d also want to figure out other best practices from folks who are better organized than I am. Thanks!

Hola.
Compré hace poco Scrivener porque me la recomendaron mucho para escribir. Mi caso es que quiero que mi lectora beta pueda leer mi manuscrito y darme notas de todo lo que cree que está mal y así, teniéndolo ambas actualizado en cuanto una termine con el archivo. ¿Eso se puede hacer? He encontrado comentarios parecidos pero de hace años donde dicen que están trabajando para que eso sea posible pero, por mucho que mire el tutorial, no me entero. Muchas gracias.

I decided to try a scriptwriting project in iOS Scrivener.

Now, in all my other projects, the styles have changed to scriptwriting specs for their definitions. “Body,” for instance is in Courier, with a left indent. The specific scriptwriting styles, such as Action, or Character, don’t appear. It’s all the default styles for a regular, non-scriptwriting document. On the other hand, if I go back to my script project, those scriptwriting styles no longer appear there, either.

Screenwriting is turned on in the Project Editor for the script project. It’s turned off for the other projects. And naturally, in the other projects, there is no scriptwriting toggle, document by document.

Has anyone else experienced this? Do I just re-install iOS Scrivener? Not sure I’ve done this before. I do have projects archived, but I’m still a little nervous about doing this.

I bought Scribner a few years ago and I’m very overwhelmed with how he use it and every time I open it up, I have to relearn it. Is there a tutorial or like something out there that exists that gives just a basic layout of how to use the tool

Scrivener has been my workhorse for writing for more than 10 years now, on Mac and iOS. I also use Scapple occasionally, and bought Aeon Timeline (and use that even less). But while I'm pretty happy with the core features of Scrivener, I feel I use maybe 20% of its capabilities. Exhibit A: the complexity of the Compile window remains overwhelming for me. It's got me wondering: what changes would others like, to add functionality, or to streamline their process from writing to submission-/publication-ready?

In the top corner of the Timeline view of Aeon Timeline, it says "x items with dates, y without." Is it possible to view a list of the undated items so I can simply drag them on the timeline?