[Senkusha]

Yesterday was the first day I actually got to work within Scrivener, as I'm writing my fan fiction, Fatal Exception: Heartstring Purge?, and my first impression:  I'm definitely impressed!

While researching on how to use Scrivener, I discovered that I was blocking my own creativity!  I'm used to writing old-school style.  Make an outline, refine the outline, start drafting the rough draft.  And the way I found to be most successful for me, is to construct a bare-bones outline:  Inciting Event - Conclusion - The Major Climax somewhere in the middle, and a couple of major plot points before the Climax. 

Scrivener makes this super easy, because you have these Note Cards that you can place on the Cork Board.  And on each Note Card, you can fill out a synopsis of what's on the card.  Turns out that each Card is actually a Scene in your story.  Each Scene is an Outline bullet point.  This allows you to construct a very loose skeleton -- much like a pencil sketch of a drawing, just to get your ideas down on paper.  Now you can rearrange these cards to your heart's content.  Clicking inside the Card, you have a blank page.  This is where you can write out your scene!

Now for the tips part of this post:
You can have a word counter for each Scene.  This works well, but if you have a nested Binder structure, it won't tally up all your subsections.  But there's another option called Total Word Count.  That will total up all the subsection.  There's also graphical display that you can turn on, and if you use Word Count Targets, the graph will appear by each line on your Outline.  (Use Total Progress and Total Target).

You can make a Timeline.
There are two ways to track fictional time.  The first is using the Outliner with Custom Meta Data.  I created setting data, like Location, Timestamp, and Weather.  Once you have these defined, you can select to view this data in the Outliner under View -> Outliner. Now I can keep track of my story timing at a glance!  The other way is by using the Corkboard. This is more for a visual alignment of scenes happening in time.  You can Label each card by color and then change the Corkboard view from Grid to Arrange By Label.  This is helpful if you're writing multiple subplots and need a visual method of tracking the scene timing in your story.

Use the multipane:
I like having my outline at the top half of my screen, and my Corkboard/Scene writing at the bottom (I wear bifocals).  Using this setup allows me quick access to my outline data and I can write directly within Scrivener!

You can keep all your Research in the Binder:
You can keep all kinds of information at your fingertips within the Binder (the left-panel).  Inside it I have text notes, images, even full webpages!  I have all my characters broken down by Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary values, and images of each character.  There's template data filled out for each character too, so I don't have to go hunt down Wikipedia every time I need a small detail.  The best part, I think I can just copy/paste these character profiles into other Scrivener Projects if I wish to use the same characters in another story.  I can do the same thing with different Scene locations.

There's a ton of other useful features that I'll write about as I get more acclimated to using the software.  But I'm going to go have some creative fun now!