Scrivener is a piece of fabulous writing software, which I have been using since 2011. It’s technically a word processor, but that phrasing doesn’t really cover the breadth of what Scrivener actually does. It’s a one-stop shop for organizing all the research, notes, documentation, images, and little scraps of information that go along with writing a novel. And no, they are not paying me for this post — I just consider it my personal mission spread the good word of Scrivener to as many people as possible. I just think it’s neat.

One of the best things about Scrivener is that it is highly customizable. It has a ridiculous number of features, to the point that it would be virtually impossible to use all of them at once. Instead, most writers kind of pick and choose the features that are most useful to our workflow.

Multiple people I know have recently asked me about Scrivener, and it got me thinking about the features of the program I use most often, many of which I’ve stumbled into over the years almost by accident. I didn’t know a single one of these things was possible when I first started using the program. So today I want to share some of these tricks with you, in the hopes that you might find them as useful on your writing journey as I do.

Keywords/keyword chips

Keywords are one of the many ways Scrivener gives you (in addition to labels, statuses, icons, and probably many more) of categorizing each document in your project. I like to use Keywords on the actual chapters of my draft, specifically to tag where different subplots are being advanced. I also sometimes use them to track POV. You can find them in the Inspector sidebar, under the third tab. Click the three dots to the right of the “Keywords” heading and select “Show Project Keywords” for the easiest way to add, remove, and customize your project keywords. You can change the colors by double clicking on the little colored square next to each keyword. You can also nest keywords under each other for greater organization.

The reason I like keywords for this is because of something called keyword chips, which you can enable by navigating to View > Corkboard Options > Keyword Colors. This will cause little bars of color to show up on the edge of your corkboard cards, corresponding to the colors of keywords assigned to that document. (Pro tip: If they’re not all showing up, you may need to go into Corkboard Options and in the dropdown menu that says “Keyword chips”, select “All”.) This is fantastic if you’re using keywords to track the progress of subplots, because now you can just look at the corkboard and see instantly if the plot isn’t balanced right. Of course Subplot X feels stagnant – it hasn’t had a turning point of any kind in 10 chapters.

Custom templates

Right out of the box, your first Scrivener project (if you’re using a Novel template, at least) will come with two different types of template documents set up: a character sheet and a setting sheet. Whereas the default document that gets created if you hit “new document” under your Manuscript folder is a blank document, the default under, say, the Characters folder will be that character sheet template. The templates themselves are sitting right there in the Template Sheets folder, so you can edit and customize them to your hearts content.

But did you know you can also create entirely new template sheets of your own, for any folder you want?

To use this feature, set up a document to look like the blank whatever-template of your dreams, and stick it in the Template Sheets folder. Now navigate to the folder you want your new template to be the default for, and select Documents > Default Template For Subdocuments > [Name of your new template sheet]. And you’re done! Now every new document you create under that folder will be a copy of your template sheet, and no more formatting headaches for you.

I’ve seen people make great use of this feature for worldbuilding. If you’re working to keep track of a bunch of different fantasy creatures, consider setting up a template for species information. Or maybe you’re juggling a vast collection of sci-fi gadgets, mysterious government organizations, or sects of your complicated, ever-warring fictional religion. Either way, this feature could help you a lot.

Project bookmarks

This feature has gone through a number of iterations since the days of yore when I first started using Scrivener, and I will admit this has caused me no end of frustration. But I have come to love where it’s landed.

If you click on your manuscript, over in the Inspector sidebar, you’ll see this thing called Project Bookmarks. When you start a new document there will probably be some folders bookmarked by default, like Characters and Settings. Project Bookmarks allow you to view a little preview of these items in that sidebar to reference them quickly from the homepage of your manuscript. You can add one by clicking the three-dot menu and selecting the desired file or document under “Add Internal Bookmark.” You can also bookmark external files or pages here if you want.

Personally, I like to create a folder somewhere in every new project containing the following documents:

• A “Summaries” document where I can write short overviews and blurbs of the book and keep a record of how they’ve evolved as I’ve gone along. I find this helpful for keeping the overall project in mind as I write, as I tend to be person who looses the forest for the trees fairly easily. Having an overarching summary to look back on frequently is helpful for me.
• A “Revision Notes” document that contains chaotic bullet point lists, frantically ungrammatical notes to self, and random ideas for things I should have written in the first draft but didn’t think of until I was 70,000 words deep and it was too late to turn back. First Draft Me does not have problems – she stores them in this document and gives them to Revision Me to worry about later.
• A document containing a list of things I need to research.

You might also want to bookmark your outline, if you’re storing that in Scrivener. Anything you think you might need to reference with the big picture of your novel sitting before you. Revision You will thank you.

Toolbar customization

The top toolbar in Scrivener is fully customizable, with a whole bunch of different options you probably didn’t know existed if you’ve never fiddled with it. Navigate to View > Customize Toolbars and a window should pop up with a ton of options for both the formatting toolbar and the main toolbar above it. There are all kinds of shortcuts you can add in here depending on what features you use or don’t use, and you can organize it exactly how you like. I really have no specific recommendations here other than to spend some time exploring the options and making it your own. When I discovered I could rearrange the toolbar, the improvement to my quality of life was vast and immediate, and I uncovered a lot of other cool features I didn’t know about in the process.

Document links

Keeping track of the behemoth-sized projects Scrivener allows your novel to grow into is no small task. Luckily there’s a way to set up cross-referencing between documents to make the connections between locations, characters, chapters, miscellaneous notes, scraps of research, and whatever else your creativity has spawned so much easier.

Highlight the word or phrase you want to cross-reference, right click on it, hover over “Link to Document”, and select the document you want to reference it to. Now the word or phrase should be hyperlinked, and you can click on it to open the linked document in split-screen view, allowing you to view both the linker and the linkee documents side by side. For extremely complicated projects, especially those with huge amounts of worldbuilding or research or complicated foreshadowing, this is a great way to keep track of how it all ties together.

To this day, I’m learning new things about Scrivener all the time, and I’m sure I still haven’t uncovered all the cool features and ways to use it. If you’ve got a favorite Scrivener trick, leave a comment and let me know. And as always, happy writing.