Scrivener is an excellent program for writing books. Its ability to get out of the way and let you write, organize and outline before, after, or during your first draft, are second to none. For fiction writing, it allows a writer to keep notes, character studies, settings notes, and so forth for easy access. For a non-fiction writer, it does all of the above and allows a researcher to store PDFs and other resources right within the file, at hand.
I also use Scrivener to write blogs that become books. I contribute or am responsible for about five blogs on a regular basis—more as a guest poster. That’s lot of writing. For many years, I wrote directly in Blogger, or WordPress, or a word processor, though I was using Scrivener for all my longer projects. Then I had an epiphany: “if Scrivener is so good for writing—why am I not using it to write?”
Since Scrivener allows a writer to organize the pieces that make up a particular writing in almost any way, it is easily configured to fit the purpose and writing of blog posts.
Let’s say that I only write one blog (or a primary blog), or I want to keep each blog separate. This is easy to do, of course. (See figure 1.) All of my posts are listed in the leftmost pane, my writing space is in the middle. If I need to access research documents or other notes, I can open that file from the bottom (“research documents” just above “Trash”). On the right is a pane in “‘outline” mode, showing every post I have written, along with its word count. On the far right is the “status” field; I can choose the status of each post right there in that pane (to do, first draft, revised draft, and done). You can change these, of course: the final status could be “posted” or “published.”
Maybe I decided that these blog posts need to be organized in some way: by subject matter, for easy reference later. Or perhaps I want them grouped by month, to make it easy to see my posting schedule. I can use folders to do this (Figure 2). Note that it also makes it easy to close folders that I do not need to look inside.
The flexibility of Scrivener allows me to use these organizational options at any time, not just before I begin writing, by adding new folders and dragging documents and folders around.
Likewise, regardless of the structure I choose, I can add other folders or sections for research notes, contact notes, PDFs, images, etc., and add others as needs arise.
If I decide to write a series of posts on the same subject, I can create the blank documents for each (and put it where ever I like—I could have “drafts” folder or a “future posts” folder, or just place them in the order I will write and publish them). In Figure 2, the “Mar 2014” folder has four documents that are blank. If they were part of a four-part series, I could easily add notes and ideas to the future posts as I think of them when writing earlier posts. When I prepare to write those future posts, the notes are there to remind me of ideas I had earlier.
Perhaps I want to keep all of my blog posts for every blog, in one place. Each blog become a top-level folder. Within each folder is each blog post. Or I could add folders within folders to organize the blog. Here I have a folder for each post, with one document for research notes, one for “about” (what the curator of the blog has asked me to do and other non-research notes), and the post itself. Again, the posts could be organized by month, or topic, etc.
(I know some writers who keep everything they write in one Scrivener project. They say that it makes it easy for them to quickly find anything they have written before, no matter how long ago. I do not have that need very often, but I can see the value.)
n Figure 3, I have added an “ideas for future posts” document within each separate blog. Since I almost always have Scrivener running, I can easily add an idea that comes to me while I am writing, editing, researching other projects.
Finally, for me, the greatest benefit of writing my blog posts in Scrivener is because for some of my blogs, I intend to turn sections of the blogs into books. This saves a large amount of time in getting material from one format to another for editing, revising, and organizing or reorganizing. It continues to allow me to refer to research notes (or add more later); to expand, delete, and rearrange material at ease—in the same environment in which I wrote it. When I am ready, I can export it to the media needed for publication. Figure 4 is an example of a blog that I occasionally write for.
The separation sections of the book are each a separate folder on the left hand pane. At the top of that pain are some single documents that will become introductory material for the book, but not part of the blog (I added those about a year after starting the blog). The folder that is open is the current section I am writing, with each post, written and unwritten, showing. Below that are future sections of blog posts (and chapters of a book); further down are some supporting documents in PDF formats.
The middle pane is where I write; the right-hand pane is a list (in outline mode) of the folder I am currently working in. It shows the title of each post (though I know the subject matter, I do not title each post until after I have written it). Further to the right (not seen) is each post’s word count and status. I also assigned keywords to each post based on its subject matter. Perhaps this will become an index for the book.
Because I knew from the beginning that this blog project would become several books I set it up as such, and even added documents for each post with its subject matter, because I knew it ahead of time. But you might not know, or have plans, that a blog (or a collection of posts) could become a book. Even if you did not plan out your structure for that possibility, once again the flexibility of Scrivener allows you to rearrange your project to fit that possibility. Why not always have the option to easily turn your separate writings into a book?
Scrivener describes the upper-level file that it creates as a “project,” which might lead us to think narrowly: Scrivener is for books, long essays, or more complex writing that research a lot of research notes and sections. But it need not be so: Scrivener can also be a “project” that holds all of your short stories that might become a book of short stories some day. It can be a project that holds all of your essays on writing, or shed-building, or gardening, that might one day become a collection of essays in book form. It can even be a project that holds a wide variety of your newspaper or magazine articles on current events or politics, which allows you to easily find that story you write a year ago that has now become relevant again.
One can never know what future possibilities might present themselves for your current writing. This method can help you make it much easier to refer to, or re-use, your material when those options arise.
For other posts that discuss ways to use Scrivener, see the following:
How I Use Scrivener to Write Books & Blogs (Part 1: Preparation)
How I Use Scrivener to Write Books (part 2: writing)
How I Use Scrivener to Write Books (part 3: editing)
