Master your manuscript

Scrivener is much more than a writing app. Its sidebar, called the Binder, is the nerve centre of every writing project – hosting your writing, research materials, character sketches and notes – and includes powerful tools for organising your ideas.

Here are five ways to get the most out of this flexible feature.

The Binder gives you a bird’s-eye view of your project’s organisation, with folders for chapters and locations, and documents for individual scenes or characters. Click a folder or document to show its contents in the main window area; create a new item in any folder by selecting the folder and hitting Return.

The Binder also serves as a dynamic outline: reorganise chapters and scenes simply by dragging folders and files up and down within the manuscript section. (Pro tip: when you’re in Corkboard or Outline view, reordering documents in the main area also changes their positions in the Binder.)

The Research folder is a convenient place to store info related to your project, including text files, PDFs, images and videos. To add items to this folder, drag them in from the Finder. You can even store full web pages here: choose File > Import > Web Page and paste a URL.

Need to keep track of a timeline or minor characters? The Notes folder hosts your working notes – as many rich-text documents as you need. And if you plan to publish, the Front Matter folder is the place to store things such as a title page, copyright page and introduction.

The Characters and Places folders, part of creative-writing templates, are special: select one and press Return for a new Character Sketch or Setting Sketch – documents prefilled with contextual prompts to help you flesh out a person or place, respectively.

Tweak these templates to your needs by editing the corresponding documents in the Template Sheets folder (at the bottom of the Binder).

Scrivener’s Collections let you group several related documents for quick access – for example, when working on multiple scenes that include a particular character – without changing their locations in the Binder.

To create a collection, Command-click the documents you want to add, choose Documents > Add to Collection > New Collection and give the new collection a name. (Show or hide Collections in the Binder by choosing View > Show Collections or Hide Collections, respectively.)

Sometimes it’s easier to edit multiple scenes or chapters when they’re flowed together – and the Scrivenings feature makes this simple. Select multiple documents, or a folder of documents, and choose View > Scrivenings. The documents’ contents are presented as if they were a single document in the order they appear in the Binder, making it easy to scroll through.

Any edits you make in Scrivenings mode apply to the original documents – Scrivener figures out which edits go where.

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