Storytelling With Scrivener

Lesson: Creating & Working In a New Document

By: Kristen Kieffer | StorytellingWithScrivener.com

Writers, it’s time to begin writing. That’s right, in this lesson we will finally break how to do some actual writing and editing work inside of Scrivener. All of the program’s many features are fantastic and potentially beneficial to your writing process, but at the end of the day, we need to get some words down on paper if we’re to call ourselves writers, right? So, let’s dive in.

In Scrivener, you can create individual documents that can then be housed and organized in your Binder here on the left-hand side. Each document can represent a scene, a chapter, some notes or research… whatever you like, really!

To create a new document, simply decide where you would like to place it within your Scrivener Binder, select the document or folder icon immediately above that space, then press the Add button in your Scrivener Toolbar. You can then go ahead and name your new document in the Binder. You can also rename a document at any time by double-clicking on the title, typing the new name, and pressing enter.

After creating your new document, you’ll notice that it appears in the center window here. This window is called the Editor, or the text window. It’s quite similar to your standard word processor, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Simply place your cursor and begin typing. If you would like to view your document as a series of pages rather than one unending white screen, you can simply head up to the Show-And-Hide button in your Toolbar, click on the dropdown menu, and select the “Show Pageview” button.

As you can see, this now breaks up your text into traditional pages better suited for understanding how long your printed document would be. For whatever reason, I find Pageview to be more motivating than the other, fuller-screened mode. I feel more accomplished when wracking up a page count as I write.

Generally, Scrivener keeps the Editor window pretty simple, but there are a few icons and options we need to discuss. First, let’s head up to your style bar. This style bar likely looks fairly similar to others you have used in different word processors, so we’ll just give a quick overview of its capabilities now.

First, you have a paragraph and character styles dropdown menu. To use this menu, simply highlight text in your document that you’d like to reformat or restyle, then use this menu to transform the styling, formatting it as a title, a block quote, a heading, etc. You can even create your own custom styles by manipulating the text in your document to look the way you want, then highlighting that text, and selecting the “Show Styles Panel” in your dropdown menu. From here, you can click the “plus” button to create a new style from your highlighted text.

Back in your style bar, we next have the dropdown font menu, the font styling menu, and the font size menu. You can also select the next several buttons to bold, italicize, or underline your next. The next four buttons then allow you to left-align, center, right-align, or justify blocks of text. You can also change your font color, your font highlight color, and line spacing. Finally, you can use the last dropdown menu to select between several list styling options. Pretty simple, right? You’ve probably seen this kind of style bar around before.

Now, directly below your style bar in this Scrivener Editor, there are a few more things we need to discuss — this time, very unique to Scrivener. Firstly, is the set of arrows here on your left. You can use these arrows to navigate between the documents you were working on in this Editor immediately before or after working on your current document. Then, you have the title of your document. You can click and type here to rename your document if you wish. You’ll notice this change take place in your Binder on the left as well after you’ve pressed enter.

On your right, you have an up and down arrow. These arrows allow you to navigate to the documents immediately above or below your current document in your Scrivener Binder. Finally, here, we have the Split the Document icon, which allows you to view different documents or different sections of the same document at once in two separate Editor windows. We’ll take more about this feature in an upcoming lesson in our course, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, let’s move on to the footer of our Editor window.

On the bottom right here, you have two icons. The first allows you to set a word count target for your current document. The second allows you to toggle whether or not this document should be included when compiling your Scrivener project. We’ll talk more about both of these features in two later videos in our course. Okay?

In the center of our Editor footer here, though, you’ll notice your running word count for your document. You can click on this number to view even more statistics about your current document as well, including the paragraph and sentence count, the average paragraph length, and an estimate of how long it would take to read your current document. Pretty neat, right?

And finally, on the left-hand side of your Scrivener footer, you have the Text Scale menu. This allows you to change how large or small your text appears on the screen. This does not, however, change the font size of your text, mind you. It only zooms in or our on your document.

And that’s it, writers. That’s our overview of the Scrivener Editor, where all the writing and editing magic happens. There are some pretty cool features that you can use as you write and edit your project, which we’ll discuss further in upcoming video lessons in this section of our course, but I do hope you found the breakdown of these Editor basic to be helpful.