Scrivener: Labels.

I love Scrivener. Love love luuuurrrvve. Want to have its babies kind of love.

When I first had to give up SuperNotecard and move to Scrivener, mid-manuscript, no less, I was dubious.

I shouldn’t have worried. Scrivener has quickly won my heart. And the split screen feature is a HUGE plus. I love being able to have two different views open simultaneously within the software.

One thing I’ve also quickly learned to love is the labels function. I use it in a variety of ways. For example, for my Triple Trouble series, which is growing into a massive project, I can use them to color-code characters. Like wolves one color, dragons another, jaguars, etc. Makes it easy when I’m looking for a character to find them that way.

Likewise, I use labels to denote a particular section’s “doneness.” I use bright pink with a “To Finish” label and make sure to set the color to be viewable in the binder, the corkboard, outline, etc. As I finish each section, I remove the label. Makes it super easy to see what I still have yet to finish.

You could use labels any way you like. (Yes, I know I could use the status function, but with the label, it’s right there in my face.) But as you can see from the screenshot from my current WIP, what has yet to be done stands out like a sore thumb, no?

And the reason I have the [[ brackets is because it’s an old holdover for me from years ago, before SuperNotecard, when I still used Word and Word alone. A friend taught it to me. It allowed me to skim through a manuscript with the Find feature to locate places quickly. When I moved to SuperNotecard, I used them for both chapter names/titles (so I could skim through the exported manuscript quickly for formatting) and to denote places where I still needed to fix, tweak, or check something. For example: [[finish scene, [[insert sex scene here, [[check spelling of that, [[check correct trademark. Those kinds of notes to myself.

And this file started out in SNC. When I exported it to Scrivener, I kept the bracket notations because as I split the resulting exported file into chunks again, I was easily able to find my “cards” in the .rtf file it exported and then split it back into chunks in Scrivener.

This is just one of the many ways I use Scrivener to work for me and make my workflow process more efficient.