Thank you, that's very good of you to say. Longer ago than you, I used to relish an online resource called "Bend Word to Your Will" which had thousands of really key tips. Until one day I just realised I could use Pages or Scrivener or just about anything else, and spend my time actually writing.

Thinking about your momentum point there. Isn't it strange how you can type on the same keyboard, on the same device, but still there is such a difference in writing apps? I find Word slows me down and Scrivener, Pages, OmniOutliner, all sorts of other ones speed me up.

Thanks, that's very good of you to say.

Thank you -- and sorry, too.

Thanks, I appreciate that. I’ve had times when I’ve tried something because of a review and realised the reviewer can’t possibly have used it. Once it was even clear that they hadn’t launched it because - the developer later admitted - there was a bug that meant it crashed on launch. Don’t ask me how it made it through Apple’s approvals.

Thank you, that's made my day. And I've been to Kentucky: I only had a day but I liked it enormously.

If I understand you correctly, this is about the way you can drag one text file into another. So then you have the first text file and tucked away within it, the next or however many you want. I see how to do it, and I suppose I can see the advantage in how you can collapse those text files so that only the top one is showing. But I don't know why I would use that.

Goodness, that's very kind of you to say. Thanks.

Ooooh. That would be another vote for Ulysses but a first for Drafts' actions. I am woefully underusing Drafts, this could be the excuse I need... to put off writing. I like it, thank you.

@@WilliamGallagher Comments seem to be disappearing from here- drafts actions are really powerful- drafts to MindNode,omnioutliner,ulysses etc.

Thank you, that's very good of you to say. I worried about the length, but I wanted to make a single comprehensive video. I might do more chapters and signposting, though.

Thank you, that's very good of you to say. Now go write something!

Thank you, that's very good of you to say.

Thank you, that's very good of you to say.

That’s made my day, thank you.

Goodness, that's very kind of you to say. Thank you both.

The word ‘Genius’ has now been devaluated and holds only 00.7% of it’s orginal value. It is, in fact, almost meaningless, except to youtube viewers who, in their cultural poverty, lack the ability to apply a better term.

@Mr.Monta77 Well.

@@WilliamGallagher Sarcasm intended, I should possibly have added.

Thank you. I hope you relish Scrivener as much as I do.

Thanks. Do you mean you found the Name Generator? I had to go searching, too, but it's under the Edit menu. Choose Edit, then Writing Tools and then you get the Name Generator at the very bottom of the list. 58keys is about the Mac in part because KZfaq likes a specific niche, but really because I love this stuff and I don't believe I'd have had the writing career I have without Macs. I hope you come to love yours as much..

@@WilliamGallagher yes! It took a bit but I did find it and will definitely use it!

Thank you, that's very good of you to say. Now, of course, you just have to go write in Scrivener. Off you pop - and do let me know how you get on.

That made me beam, thanks. Isn't the advice always, always "start writing"? Except when it's "keep writing." Or, as in this case with me right now, "stop making tea and get back to writing."

Thank you, that's so good of you to say.

Thank you.

Excellent. Would you let me know how you get on? Scrivener and a MacBook Air are a very nice combination.

That's made my day, thank you.

Thank you. I had to think there what I'd pledged.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

Thank you. But let me warn you against AirDrop. It's a great, great thing, but it's manual. You will have to remember to AirDrop the Scrivener document between your devices and also remember which device has the latest one. It will go wrong. There's not going to be a solution that lets Scrivener use iCloud because of how the two work right at heart. But you're unlikely to have any Scrivener document that is bigger than the free space Dropbox offers: I've been using Scrivener with Dropbox from the start and I am still on the free version.

@@WilliamGallagher Just to confirm, there seems to be one file ".scriv" which is the whole project and up-to-date if I quit Scrivener before doing some sort of manual copy, correct? I don't see a folder with many files for each project. And I am just not a fan of Dropbox, especially since I pay Apple $3/month for iCloud (which does work for most apps) ... I do understand the "manual delimma" though. Thank you for the reply and the extra information.

The .scriv file is the complete thing, yes. But while you see it as a single file, it’s really a package containing very many parts. The trouble is that iCloud, because of how it is designed, could well sync some of those parts at one point and the others a little later. It breaks the Scrivener document. I hear you about paying for iCloud, I do the same, but for what we need, Dropbox is free. So I’m fine using it for this.

@@WilliamGallagher Thank you ... and I'm looking forward to watching more videos.

That never even occurred to me. I’m having that, thank you.

Oooh, no, I don't know of MUSE: thanks, I'll take a look. And thank you: I appreciate your saying this.

Thank you, that's very good of you to say. And OmniOutliner now goes on the list, or rather it moves from What I'd Like To Do over to What's Actually Been Asked For and So is a Higher Priority. Much appreciated.

@@WilliamGallagher do you find much overlap between your use of OmniOutliner and Scrivener? Do you go for one over the other in certain situations?

Tease. You’ve got to tell me. Got to.

@@WilliamGallagher I think KZfaq ate my reply - sorry 'bout that. It's nothing really dramatic, but it changed how I used Scrivener. Click Windows->Layouts and choose the Three Pane outliner. That will give you an outline on the left and a document on the right. As you select outline elements on the left, the associated document will appear to the right. For a better outlining experience, right click on the outline header bar and turn off everything except title and synopsis. It will be quite a bit like a simple OmniOutliner experience in the left pane, plus the documents in the right. I also like to select the folder I want to work on in the Binder and then turn the Binder off. The Three Pane outliner is better to my taste when pruned to two panes. For better granularity (more outline topics than chapters), outline in a folder under Research. To switch to outline-plus-real-draft, turn off the "automatically open" feature in the bar just under the right hand pane, turn the Binder back on, and open your Draft documents in the right pane with the Binder. Scrivener is very nice with a very nice company behind it. The software is great and the company is a writer's friend.

Thank you, that's very good of you to say.

I fully suspect and endorse this decision. In every way bar financial.

Thank you. But when you're done with the writing, you must tell me what you've been working on. I don't want to interrupt the flow now.

@William Gallagher currently working on book four in a thriller book series. I handwrote the first draft so now typing up for 2nd draft and Scrivener is certainly making it easy to have content and research and notes all in one place.

@@simonpert2485 Handwriting? Handwriting? HANDWRITING?

@@WilliamGallagher I know that old thing with a pen and a pad of paper, was a good process, when I type I am always ahead of myself with handwriting I slowed down and my word choice was better, not sure I would do it the same way for the next book though, lol

@@simonpert2485 Plainly you can read your own handwriting. I'm not bitterly jealous, no. No. Not at all. Nope.

I’m delighted, thank you.

Thanks for this, it s very good of you to say.

So pleased it was useful.

Thank you. I don't believe there is a way to password-protect a Scrivener document, no. But I realise I haven't looked into it before because my Macs are password-protected and Dropbox where I store the documents is encrypted. Could that be enough?

@@WilliamGallagher in some cases it might be enough, but there are situations where a second layer of protection might be required or advised: e.g. during the time window where the computer is still unlocked until it locks itself according to the settings one chose; or more than one admin on the same computer, … I was just curious if you’d know some way to do it in Scrivener. Thanks taking the time to reply.

Thanks. You're not the first to mention Aeon Timeline: at the moment I don't know it remotely well enough, but it's on the list.

Ive just tested Aeon timeline 3 for several weeks and it really is not ready. The mind map option seems to be standalone and simply does nothing.....so you are left with basically a spreadsheet view and a narrative. The only thing it does well is synch with Scrivener and Ulysses. Im using mind node ( thanks William for pointing me int that direction) and ulysses.

@@robertlee7605 Sad to hear that about Aeon, I was kind of hoping they had improved a bit on the 2 version.

Thank you. And sort of: I chose not to screen record the process because it's long, but I did talk through what it does, what you need to know, and what you need to worry about in the last section, which you can find here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/aMplaJCkx72xmGg.html

Thank you, that’s very good of you to say.

Someone once asked if they could include me in their novel: name, personality, physical description, all of it. I said yes immediately because I knew she'd never finish.

There is a Settings, General, Citations section in Scrivener but I've not used it. Have you looked into that one? And, oh, LiquidText is amazing, absolutely. Thanks.

Sounds risky to me. What are you using to automatically backup to Dropbox on closing Scrivener? It's already easy to forget to close a Scrivener document and so get into problems when you open it on a second machine. This feels like it's adding an extra step and so increasing the chance of something going wrong.

@@WilliamGallagher I have the windows version of scrivener. You have your save location, which I have set to My Documents, but if you go into Options/Backup/Backup Location. There it will backup everytime you close scrivener. I set this to dropbox. The good thing about this is that my book is backed up in 2 locations. There is also a tickbox on this page, to save automatic backups. That has to be on. I have it set to back up on project close, but you can also tick backup on project save too, if you don't like shutting scrivener down.

Yes, there is a crucial difference between iCloud and Dropbox. As much as I use and actually very much like iCloud, the way it physically does its syncing will break Scrivener documents. (Scrivener saves one document as what appears to be a single file, but is really a package of very many of them tied together. Dropbox will sync them all together, but iCloud will sync only parts at a time. So you could open a document on one machine and find that only some of it had been synced from your other one.).

@@WilliamGallagher Ah, okay, didn't know that. Thank you very much for the quick and detailed answer. Helped me a lot. 🙏

That sounds less about the app you write in and more about the Mac or iPad's Share feature. If it is just a paragraph, I suggest you just copy and paste into Scrivener. Or more specifically, copy and then from the Edit menu choose "Paste and Match Style" so that the new text fits with everything else and you don't have sudden font changes. I presume there must be a way to share an excerpt via Shortcuts, but I've just been looking and I can't see a way to specify that I want to share to Scrivener.

@@WilliamGallagher Thank you! That was very helpful, copy-past is just fine. Thanks again for all your wonderful videos!

Googles "Happy Talk Blond Fantasy Fiction Writing Teen Girls Fiction"... Have you checked out Scrivener's own website? They have a forum on there which I imagine must get really deep into it.

Ah, you wave biscuits at me, but then you say Windows. I know nothing about Windows. I do get that Scrivener is at least remarkably similar, startlingly so, but it’s years since I’ve used a PC. Not even sure I’ve got one around to demonstrate on. If you’re just starting with it, though, then surely you’re in a good place to see what’s clear and what needs explaining. You could do a Windows video yourself.

@@WilliamGallagher You are so funny. Bless your heart. With Scrivener3 the Windows version... apparently it is closer to the MAC version. I will just learn from you and bring my own biscuits! Waving biscuits more!

@@luannapierce2544 Hmm. It would be rude of me to not wave biscuits back, wouldn’t it? You are very bad for me: thank you hugely.

My pleasure.

I'm not clear what's caused this: there was no macOS change specifically for the M3, at least not a user-facing one like this. And I had no issue when moving to Apple Silicon. I think your best bet is to contact Scrivener support. If it's caused by an Apple change, it must've affected a lot of people and so Scrivener's support team may be aware of it.

How do you make the backup? I can see a way that if you knew for certain that the document was closed and that any changes on different machines were saved, then you could use a backup app to just copy the Scrivener project whenever you insert a thumb drive. Or perhaps a thumb drive with a certain name. That might need something more, like the Keyboard Maestro Mac utility that I swear can do anything.

@@WilliamGallagher Thank you William!! I am intending to get a MAC as my next computer 😊… sounds good!!

This is covered the video: you can’t, but it’s for solid reasons. Apple’s iCloud is built on syncing a lot of very small items and it works very well, but any one Scrivener document can be made up of a number of items - and iCloud won’t sync them all at once. So you’d end up with a corrupted Scrivener document. I get why sticking to just one cloud service is better than having a couple, but Scrivener documents tend to be small though that a book won’t fill even Dropbox’s free amount of storage.

It sounds to me as though you're not actually saving it to Dropbox. What should happen is that you have a Scrivener folder in Dropbox, and separately on your Mac there is a backups folder. Mine is at /Users/williamgallagher/Library/Application Support/Scrivener/Backups, for instance. Somehow I think you're saving it to there. I suggest you save it, then do a Save As to make a new version within the Dropbox folder. You'll get confused between the two copies for a while -- or at least I get confused by it - so make really sure everything is saved and then make even more sure that when you open the newly saved version in Dropbox that it has everything you expect.

Mike, I had the same issue. I changed the name of the Dropbox folder that contains my Scriv work and other archive stuff so it no longer includes the word 'Scrivener' and stopped getting the messages. Hope that helps.

That's a good point: I don't know and I'm surprised to say that I haven't even thought about it. I seem to remember a lot of work being done on the Windows version, possibly to bring it up to parity with the Mac one, but that was a long time ago.

Apparently no. I presume that Google Drive syncs in a similar way to iCloud, because the makers of Scrivener say that there is risk of serious data loss if you use it. (Because a single Scrivener document is actually a package of very many bits, such as your drafts and research, and only some bits may have synced over the next time you use Scrivener on a different device.)

I adore Affinity Publisher, but I'll never write a word in it. Not true: if I have to fix a mistake in the text or add a sentence in, possibly as much as a paragraph, then fine. But for actual writing, it simply isn't built for it. I do obviously like and recommend Scrivener, but really anything you can write text in that you can then import into Publisher is good.

It's because of how iCloud syncing works. Apple's one is tremendous when your documents are single items, like one Pages file. Scrivener, partly because of all the research you can add in, has "one" document that is actually countless different little bits glued together. Under iCloud, you would find that some of the document had synced before the rest and it just breaks. Not a criticism of iCloud, just the way it works.

@@WilliamGallagher got it, thanks for the explanation.

You can paste any text in to Scrivener. Radio and stage script formatting varies so I can’t know for sure that you won’t have to fiddle with them after you’ve pasted, though. I’d get the trial version ne see what happens.

@@WilliamGallagher Does that commit you to a subscription or can you literally just trial it? I've looked at the categories as I'm interested in radio and UK stage drama. What is BBc taped drama though? Does that mean TV?

@@harryturnbull1884 You can just try it, yes. If you like it, it’s then a single outright purchase, there’s no subscription. And BBC Taped Drama is the ugliest of old studio formats, invented in the 50s and meant more for camera operators than anyone else. But it’s the format that EastEnders and Doctors use to this day. I use the regular Screenplay template for everything but radio and theatre. For radio I’ve been writing in a Pages template I created ages ago but I plan to move to Scrivener next time.

@@harryturnbull1884 The trial period for Scrivener was astonishingly long.. 75 days of actual use as I recall (ie if you don't open it for a week, those days aren't included). By that time I was quite comfortable with it and the then price was so also amazingly low.

I don't know, but I suspect Scrivener would have to be the same. But there is one thing: if you already know this then I'm wasting your time, but whenever this has come up before, there's been the same reason behind it. Someone drags in a photo, then resizes it to what looks good for the book -- but the word processor retains the full-size image. So you think you've neatly reduced everything but the file size gets bloated incredibly and everything slows down. Could that be what you're seeing? I now always resize images to what I want before I drag them in.

thanks William, but I want them full size with full resolution in case we go for a print version. I couldn't bear the thought of resizing them all for the printer to tell me he wants full res. What I have found is that for 200 pages I have nearly a gigabyte file... War and Peace would have fit on a 1MB floppy...

If you're in a chapter, Snapshots grab just that chapter. But you can select many or all of them in the Binder, then choose the Documents menu, then Snapshots, then Take Snapshots of Selected Documents. That will grab the lot, though I think it divides them into separate chapters.

Yes to all: I've not heard of Zotero but a swift search says yes, that integrates with Scrivener. And you can do footnotes and references in Scrivener.

I had to watch again to see. It’s not baby oil, it’s what was a container for those cotton wool things, the little sticks with cotton on either end. I must have been using it to hold something, perhaps coins, but I can’t remember.

If you use Scrivener the way it recommends, it's extremely good. There is just this issue of what happens when you open a Scrivener document on one machine without closing it on another. The app actually does its best to cope even with that, but it is an issue of syncing rather than of Scrivener per se.

If using one device Scrivener autosaves as you go. It's only when wanting to use multiple devices there might be any issue.

Well, yes.

@@WilliamGallagher Although I have had Scrivener for a while I am just beginning to learn all the features. I have now Scrivener for Windows version 3. So, although your presentation here is very good, there are slight differences now between the versions and that it is not on a Mac.

I can report that the book survived. My nerves, not so much.

Now, I don’t see it as an excuse, I see it as a reason. If the Scrivener firm made money out of Dropbox, that would be different. But they don’t and for what we would use it for - a couple of books at a time - then the free Dropbox is fine. My one hesitation now is that Dropbox has tightened the limit on how many of your devices can use it when you are on the free version.

It is a strange, strange thing but I truly had not noticed how long it has been since a major update to Scrivener. I just use it and like it. But now it’s been pointed out to me, I remember it being some years before the previous version too. Maybe we’re due.