Kay Hudson

I’ve been exploring Scrivener as much as actually writing in it over the last couple of weeks, and sometimes I find myself floundering around without the slightest idea of where I am or how I got there.  The other night I was playing with the cork board view, trying to see if I could get more than one chapter’s worth of synopsis cards on the board at once.  At this point I only have two chapters, covering five and a half scenes and three additional cards, in my Scrivener project, but that’s a start.

After some thrashing around, clicking here and there, and, I think, linking documents together, I got all the cards in view, moved a couple of them just to see that I could, and put them all back in their original order.  Then I went on to some other task, leaving Scrivener reduced to an icon on the bar.

When I opened the file the next evening, I was horrified to see that my Project Targets widget showed no words at all on the Manuscript Target bar (the target, 80,000 words, was still there).  Where did they go?  I knew there were nearly 6,000 words in those five and a half scenes.   I knew I hadn’t deleted anything, but I clicked on various documents to be sure, and of course they were all there.  But where was my word count?

I couldn’t find an answer in the tutorial, or the manual, or even in Scrivener for Dummies.  Apparently I’d done something so silly that no one had bothered to explain it.  I moved a few things around, managed to create a couple of empty chapter-level folders, and–oh, dear–now a couple of my scenes were missing, too.

Misplaced, I told myself.  Not gone, you’ve just misplaced them.

I looked at the tutorial again–an excellent resource–and paid particular attention to how the documents were arranged in the binder.  That’s when I realized what I had done, probably while fooling around with the cork board–I’d bumped all the documents up a level or two, so that they were no longer inside the Manuscript folder.  The “Move To” pop-up menu worked better than Drag-and-Drop for this, and once I had everything back in place, neatly lined up within the Manuscript folder, my word count reappeared and all was right with the file.

There’s a lot to explore in Scrivener, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.  But I’m already hooked.  In fact, I’m thinking of importing an entire manuscript into Scrivener.  I think it will be a lot easier to revise it in Scrivener than in Word.