HOW TO OUTLINE IN SCRIVENER | CAMP NANOWRIMO PREP | HOW TO SETUP A NOVEL

hey Sylvia from write your life and in today's video we're going to set up my project project purple into Scrivener so the first thing that I do is when I open Scribner I go straight to fiction you have novel novel with parts short story I tend to go with novel I believe that my novel is actually gonna have parts but you know this is what I do if it's not broke don't fix it all right so after I name my project I go through and I kind of get rid of things that I'm not really going to use I rearranged some stuff so looking at here templates so this is where you have character sketch and setting I usually throw that in the trash and I don't delete the trash in case and here take anything out later you can go up to characters here and if you click on the plus sign or the arrow down it will show you character and setting sketches so you don't really need that at all this here is all of the different types of formatting we're not going to be using that right now because we're barely working on our first draft which is okay because it's going to be fine all right research I think I'll keep that sample standard paper again really not interested into the trash and this it makes it look like danger warning pay attention I'm gonna throw that in the trash also okay so I'm going to rearrange some things here just pick up and drag up to the top notes also places and characters above manuscript okay so notes are fine places I tend to change to scenes or settings let's do so things characters or cast is totally fine okay so that looks good we're going to start right here I actually watched a video years ago by a youtuber I will link it down below if I can find it I think his name is author level up or something like that or he set up his Scrivener and he shows you a lot of different things that he does and a lot of the stuff that I'm doing I learned from him I might do mine a little bit differently but you know just so I have you know a reference of how I do this on my channel I will definitely link his video down below so let's get started with notes I am going to go to the plus sign here and I'm going to write in chapter events some people might call this their timeline if you just want to keep track of your time this is the older version I believe of Scrivener in my MacBook I do have the newer version this is my iMac so I might have to update this because I haven't thought about that going back and forth I think you get into some struggles like they want you to pay like I don't know half of how much Scribner actually cost in order to update it so I'm gonna have to do that but we'll do that later so here is where I write things like chapter 1 oops and then I use bullet points and what I like to do is keep notes about the chapter after I'm finished with it so like I will write Friday July just a quick note to let me know that this happened on Friday July and you can put like the ninth or the 10th usually like the calendar year will obviously change by the time you publish this so as long as I know it's a Friday nights July if you're going to self publish this or what have you you can go back and put in the actual date so that it's going to line up with whatever year it's published so I leave that part of it blank I usually put what time of the day so I might put like early morning or I might put an exact time if this is you know dealing with school and then I end up putting like any scenes that are actually within chapter one so over here we have settings right that's where I kind of brainstorm what they look like so I can go back and be like okay yes this is what's in her bedroom or this is what's in my character's house or in the town whereas this is where I put like where this scene took place so I can put scene I don't know kitchen right and then I put a list sometimes of what characters are within that chapter I know this seems like a lot of work right now especially when it's NaNoWriMo I'm only doing 25,000 words instead of the whole 50 so I have a little bit more time I'm already trying to work out how I can only write for three days a week instead of all seven because that's a lot of sitting for me so basically at the end of this journey I think personally for me it's easier to already have these notes done instead of trying to go back after the fact because I've done that with the last novel that I was revising for June and it was a hot ever love and mass you guys I just couldn't even handle it you can also change these by doing something like this you can come up here and say no bullets push return have bullets here and then you can change this because it is a scene and it's different from actual time you could put like a diamond so that you know the difference between bullets and that's another way you can just kind of quickly look at it in glance and know or you can use like your highlighter up here and decide to like highlight them in different colors it's whatever works best for you and then of course underneath that you can just start with your chapter two so I have that the next thing I like to put up here add another plus I like to put the plot so I usually write it out here and then I go up here again and I usually put first person versus third so this is something new I just had him to do because I wasn't sure because I am writing a murder mystery it's a why a I wasn't sure whether or not I wanted to write this in first person or third person because maybe I'm going to have an unreliable narrator I haven't really decided that yet there's some plots and some twists that are going on that might work better in third person where we're kind of a little bit you know standoffish as opposed to first person yeah you can only hide so many secrets unless the character has like amnesia or whatever she's probably gonna know you know that she's doing horrible things you know yeah so I'm thinking third person might work best but this is a place where I can sit down and write a scene in the first person then write that same scene and third person and see which happens more naturally and which one I like the sound of best and then I also kind of like to add questions over here let's say I have a character named Vic I don't but for argument's sake I like to put any questions I have for Vic here then underneath I might have a witness any questions I have their for their background or something I might have forgotten about or maybe they have a sister and I've mentioned that and I'm like oh I need to go back and remember to write the sister in at some point or maybe there's a reason why I mentioned she has a sister all of that so I like to keep those notes here let's see what else and this one I'll just keep for miscellaneous as I'm thinking about it more sometimes I like to put like the little blurb in here the dedication what's going to go on the jacket cover all of that stuff there's places also on NaNoWriMo 'he's website for some of those things so you can do that there also and we have settings I like to put like the town here so if it's a town or a city I like to put a little bit of a description and you know you can change these up if you want to but that works pretty pretty nicely sometimes I just delete a few things like this one I don't know that I would really need but yeah let's see what else would I put here there's going to be a school because I'm dealing with teenagers main characters house and so other things that come up as I am looking over my plotting I've usually tried to make some kind of a note of okay this setting is going to be here or the scene is going to be there and that doesn't always happen usually I'm a lot more prepared than this however you know you've been following my channel for a while that I decided to go with something different than was planned so yeah but that's okay that's part of nano if it's gonna be crazy might as well make it really crazy right I think so and then we have characters here yeah I'm gonna show you kind of how I do that so let's make like five quick characters name this one thick Hector and if you don't have like a name right now you can also put like victim/witness we won't see it police will say cop yeah I will do all of that and then I'm gonna get some pictures for these or in these are all already character sketches which we have to fill out we'll keep it in cork board so there's two different settings you have this one which aligns them perfectly and then this one that allows you to like overlap so that you can kind of like it's kind of cool I don't know if this is the same in settings let me see it is so like say that I had a picture of an actual school a town and my characters room which maybe I'll do for you so you can see you can overlap them and make them look like a collage which is kind of cool or you can just go back to this and a little straighten them out okay let me get some pictures really quickly okay in case I cut this out I actually went into canva and got some pictures so okay got them here and so we have Vic pull and drag him over mmm then we have Hector and we have another guy yeah victim so let's see here okay and then we have our witness so what do we have left I just grabbed some pictures off of a canvas oh okay here's a witness god I love her hair my hair is like between curly and straight if that makes sense being part native Spanish and black you just get you know this hair that's kind of a little of everything but nothing so it's not completely like curls like hers which I wish mine was more curly or just straight but not in the center which is exactly what happened um okay so cop I don't think I well these guys look more like detectives so I could change that later but oh I don't know where I'm going sorry whatever here there you go yeah they look more like detectives but we will give them this picture because yeah why not okay and then we have my protagonist is that everyone they grab it anything else in here yep I think that's it okay cool so now I can close that this will become big all the way across now haha look at how that's all set up isn't that nice and neat I love it so we have Vic um I keep wanting to call him Victor which I probably should just named in that but whatever you can also edit this to say suspect right you can say here boyfriend actually he looks older so let's let's put husband husband and then victim we could put her name there or maybe we don't know who she is yet or maybe her identity wasn't really her actual identity of course this has nothing to do with mine because I'm dealing with teens but I'm just trying to show you kind of how I set this up witness I like that I don't have a name for her she looks I don't know Rose she looks like a charlie to me I always loved like when people are really beautiful like her I like it when they use boy names you know what I mean like if you're not if you're like just an average or less than average looking person I think when you're named a boy name which probably sounds rude it it's just kind of weird but I think when a really pretty women have like boy names and they can pull it off it's nice so we're gonna call her charlie cops protagonist I have my protagonists name I don't want to share it so we're just gonna name her Meg right cool great she actually could go with a boy's name - because she's really pretty so she I mean whatever so um yeah but we're not gonna name her because we don't know who she is so that's sort of how I set up everything this is like you know you make yourself your own murder board or whatever you wanted to and then you can of course do this to make it more like a collage seem with if over here I went ahead and put in the town school and characters house I get down to the bottom and click on that you can kind of just like overlap them and move them around in any way that you want to same for over here if you weren't sure like we've already put label on all of these people but if you weren't sure you could divide them up into who you thought might be bad or who you thought might be good and someone like in the middle if that makes sense oh I just love this this is like my favorite part I know we haven't done no writing at all but still I'm enjoying myself okay so those are the main things that I kind of do to set up before I even start writing so I've already written a lot of the character events because I've written my outline I've already got it kind of typed up it's not to where I want it to be obviously because I've started light in the game of this new project but I can copy and paste a lot of the information right into here now if you wanted to have this events chapter events which I think I do I want to have it separate you could go ahead and just make another one for your outline and of course you can just you know pick it up and drag it up here because I should probably go in here first and then as I'm writing if something changes because who knows what things always change you can go ahead and put those changes here and they might not reflect what's actually in your outline that we can keep your outline with you to refer to whatever you want and you can also keep that no I think that's where I'd keep it because in the manuscript you don't want any of these things in there because of the next thing that we're going to do I really don't do anything with research sometimes if I'm writing like when I was writing my my last book it was a lot of world-building then I have to look up stuff I put research down there especially links to websites and what-have-you I don't know that I'll need many of these if I decide to not have it in like a state that I've lived in or lived around I might have to do a little bit of research like that if that makes sense because this is just a murder mystery set in modern days so I don't have any like real world building to kind of do okay so we can close all of those things and let's focus on our manuscript so this is why I was saying you don't want any of these things in your manuscript because we want to put some goals on our manuscript so we're gonna go up to the top here we're gonna go to show project targets I am going to be currently working in words we are going to be writing 25,000 words which is half of what usually the original camp is but in you know excuse me which is half of what be regular NaNoWriMo is but this is camp so you make your own rules I feel like you should make your own rules even if it's regular denim but you know you do so it says we have a zero of 25,000 and then this bar will start to turn green and get fuller as we start to reach our goal okay so now we want to go to options and show overrun okay we want a deadline show target notifications sure okay so let's pick our deadline is four seven which is July 31st and I'll just type in 2020 okay cool and that is set okay yeah yeah okay now I want to go back into options look at session okay a reset session count at said time each day that looks good to me I'm going to say at 12:00 a.m. yeah okay so this one is another one that's very important down here you can choose how many days a week that you want to write I want to allow writing on the day of my deadline of course that's probably what I'm going to have to push to write as much as I can okay so if you click here you can choose what days you're going to write on I'm gonna write on Fridays and we're going to do some 5k Fridays probably towards the end of the month when we only done the most I also have writing sprints told for Sunday's with my group and then of course on Mondays I have a natural writing day so because I am a player person in habit tracker I know exactly what days I write on the most and what days are right on the least and in the middle of the week I don't do pretty much any writing but for some reason like I have this inner clock that naturally goes off on a Monday I think it's because I'm a Monday start kind of a person I'm like okay let's start off the week right by writing so I naturally right here so it's great that we have writing sprints on Sunday because it just goes into Monday if you were the type of person who has a full-time job or you're a parent or you just have like life in general and you're like I don't know how I can do challenges like this and write everyday you don't have to set your own goal like my goal is to do three days a week if I get more than that fantastic but I'm not really gonna stress it I believe that I can do this challenge with three days 25,000 words which is half of a novel but I'll have this story finally worked on and start it so all of that looks good to me I'm gonna push okay I'm gonna close this guy and the last thing is chapters so okay this is how I kind of set this up I this is why I should have probably done the novel with you know parts but you know I've never used that so I didn't want to start today act one go up here and oh that naturally happened I did not mean to do that I was trying to click on the arrow had a folder add a new folder okay act two act 3 and we can come in here and put a bunch of scenes into all of these just to show you how I like to use this part okay so if you click on actual act 1 and you're in corkboard mode like if you go into this one it's just going to show you everything you've written and each one of these lines of dashes that's where all of those would add up so that you could read them one after the other this is all of your stats here which is amazing and if you click on this arrow over here I believe yes this is where you can take things off and add things on to this list so if you're not going to use your total target you could take that off if you wanted to but corkboard mode if you're here that's how it looks in corkboard mode it just goes naturally back to the document but we're going to be in our our act 1 so I can write something up here this is how you this is how I outlined after I've already put things on post-its I need to move things around again digitally so you can put I don't know let's just write something you okay so I've written a few things on here hopefully everything's spelled correctly I'm just trying to get through this quickly struggles are real okay so down here at the bottom you can push that right to make it collage you can push this and it's go straighten things out you can also change different like sizing here so if you want less cards in a row you can do that also but character dies maybe she dies at the beginning maybe she dies more towards the middle so maybe we want this over there so you can just kind of move these around so I tend to take all of my plot points put them all on carts and then just rearrange them and sometimes some things are in act 1 we'll move down to act 2 and the same for act 2 and 3 so yeah maybe she goes to the grocery store here and somebody you know I don't know her stalker ends up seeing her at the grocery store and that's where all of the mess begins and he follows her home and murders her or something we don't know a car accident maybe after the grocery store he doesn't kill her maybe after the grocery store she meets Vic who's of the suspect right and then shortly after that she gets into a car accident and maybe we all think it's Vic who like hit her on purpose because we don't know who ended up you know banging in her car because they drove away it was a hit-and-run y'all okay so stuff like that also like school lunch sounds pretty boring but maybe she's a teacher and she finds something in her like lunch box like a note or something that's kind of strange and weird and maybe that's you know how it starts after breakfast right so breakfast would be her opening scene or opening image where we just see our character in her everyday mundane life and then dies and then there's like this train ride that happens later who knows what that's about bada-bing bada-boom same thing with over here let's go back to characters the other thing I like to do with this is come down to the bottom and you can rearrange these on a timeline so since we're doing a murder mystery or since I'm doing a murder we could have this red line mean something right so red could mean they're suspect this orange line could mean we're not sure yellow is not really but maybe we should just talk to them because they have information Green is we absolutely know they didn't do it like for instance we know our victim didn't kill herself because she was like bludgeoned to death or something so you can just drag it down and you see how it already turns this green which is kind of amazing so the witness may be the witness had something to do with it maybe she's not telling us everything come on Charlie and then the cops will just put down here on blue because they're the ones investigating husband is maybe right and then suspect is definitely we obviously think he's the suspect at this point of whodunit and then Meg which is interesting could be here in the yellow right because maybe she is an unreliable witness and we're just not sure I keep trying to pull that so you can see it all but sorry they want it to be separate sorry sorry Scribner so there you go and now they're all color coded so when you come back out of this you can see that they all have color which is kind of snazzy right pretty simple loosey-goosey and then of course you can straighten them back out like this if you want to or you can go into this mode where you can rearrange and kind of put them you know on the same color coding system you there you go so you have the same thing going on there I think that if you click on these let me see you can switch it by clicking up here on this little photo or icon that looks like an index card yes and then they'll show you some information or you can go back to photo by clicking that okay man I am so excited for tomorrow I'm gonna put in all of my stuff and then early in the morning I'm going to be having early morning writing sprints every single Friday I'm starting off with a Wednesday one because NaNoWriMo starts off on a Wednesday so I thought I'd have one for the first day to start off this whole camp right with some writing so I'm very excited wish me luck good luck to you guys I hope that you get everything that you need out of this camp I am so excited all right my name is Sylvia don't forget to like comment and subscribe I hope this was helpful thanks for watching and I'll talk to you soon bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sylvia With A Plan

Views: 4,603

Keywords: how to, outlining a novel, best software for writers, how to outline a book, writing advice, writing tips, write with me, outlining a novel in scrivener, how to outline a novel with scrivener, scrivener for beginners, scrivener tips, scrivener tips and tricks, best writing app for writers, best writing apps for authors, best apps for novelists, writing a novel with scrivener, how to write a novel with scrivener, scrivener walkthrough, scrivener how to, nanowrimo 2020

Id: 7hFhZABN3KU

Length: 29min 55sec (1795 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020