Chapter 2

Organizing Your Work with the Binder

In This Chapter

Looking at Scrivener documents and folders

Branching off from the root folders

Putting the elements of your project in place

Adjusting items in Scrivener

Through the Binder, Scrivener gives you total control over how you organize your manuscript. By using folders to separate it into chapters or parts — or anything else you can think of — you can quickly and easily navigate through your work.

When I write, I like to get all the scenes down without worrying about dividing them into chapters until later. Because I’ve recently started doing some basic outlining before I start, I now set up four folders — one for each of the book’s parts — and add the newest scene to whichever part it belongs. At the end, I go back and group the scenes into chapter folders.

Scrivener gives you the flexibility to write (or, at least, synopsize) out of order, if desired. And unlike in a word processor, where you might have to create a separate file for those scenes you weren’t ready for, or keep pushing the out-of-order scenes to the bottom of the word processor document, you can keep them all within your Scrivener project without creating a mess.

This chapter shows you how to organize and manipulate your files and folders to set up the best structure for your writing process.