Scrivener Video Tutorials for Mystery Writers
With a little help from Sherlock Holmes
I love Scrivener. If I could marry Scrivener and have its baby, I would.
I know in the writing community, that can be a controversial statement, but for those of you who’ve tried Scrivener and felt frustrated, or for those of you who’ve been put off by claims it’s too hard or too complicated, I might be of some help.
A couple of years ago I produced two Scrivener video tutorials for the Sisters in Crime Guppies chapter.
In the first video, I go step by step about the basics: how to create a project, how to break your work into scenes, how to use the cork board and index cards for outlining, and how to utilize Scrivener’s built in character and setting templates.
And because I write mysteries, I used examples from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet,” featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson.
The second video goes into more advanced Scrivener features and is good for someone who already uses Scrivener but is interested in learning more.
As with any word processing software, you need a system for backing up your projects the correct way. Personally, I keep my Scrivener projects in Dropbox, my backups on my MacBook, and periodically I copy the projects to an external hard drive.
By saving my projects on Dropbox, I can work on them from multiple computers. However you must completely close Scrivener on one computer before you open it on another. If you don’t follow that process religiously, you’ll lose your work. For more on Scrivener backups, here are some helpful links:
Since I’m big on customization, I use a bunch of different Scrivener color themes. The themes I use in the videos came from Kamryn Koble of GreyZone Pages. They’re free if you sign up for her website newsletter and you can find them here. Although Kamryn's themes are for Mac only, there are Scrivener themes for Windows as well, but you’ll need to Google them.
Scrivener has a 30-day free trial, and no I don’t get anything from them for recommending the software. I just love working with it and wanted to share some helpful tips.