How to Get Started with Scrivener (and My Top 5 Tools)
Screenshot of the Scrivener app, showing text from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
I was chatting with some writers in The Worldbuilder’s Tavern Discord server about how much I love Scrivener, and several people said that they’d heard the app was really helpful for novel writing but were intimidated to learn it. I understand, because Scrivener can do a lot and that can be overwhelming.
So I made a tutorial. I’ll show you how to get started, Scrivener’s basic functions, how I personally set up my Scrivener documents, and my five favourite tools.
I’ve included the basic info from the video in text format below, though watching the video will allow you to actually see the steps and where the menu items are located.
Getting Started
Open Scrivener. This screen has some tutorials you can go through on your own and various templates for different kinds of writing projects (you can choose Fiction or Nonfiction and explore those). We’re going to click the Blank template and start from scratch. You’ll be prompted to enter a name for your project and then will be in the basic, vanilla Scrivener document.
The Binder and the Draft Folder
The section on the left is called the Binder. It is the menu to the pages of text you will add to this project.
The folder called Draft is for the text of your novel. When you’re finished a novel and want to compile it into a Word or PDF document, only the files in your Draft folder will be compiled.
If you hit the green plus symbol, you can add either a folder or a text document. I like to write my first draft with just text documents, so I’ll make a text document for each chapter.
You can also organize your chapters as folders instead, and put text documents inside them. This is helpful if you want to organize your novel by scenes. I tend to use this feature in the second draft, because I just want to get all the words out and not pause to make a new document when I have a scene break. You can also use folders to separate your chapters and scenes into acts or parts.
Composition Mode
If you want to eliminate distractions while you’re writing, you can turn on Composition Mode by pressing this button on the upper right.
It opens up a window with just your text file. You can fade out the background as much as you want, or even add a custom image into the background to create a specific aesthetic. You can also change the font and background colours if you prefer dark text on a light background or vice versa. I’ll show you how to do that later when we talk about customization.
Split-Screen Mode
Another useful mode while you’re writing is split-screen. This might be my favourite Scrivener feature, because it lets you look at two documents at once.
Hit the button on the top right of your text page (it looks like two vertical rectangles sitting next to each other) and suddenly you have two windows. I love this, because I can look at another chapter or a research document while I’m writing.
If you’re coming from working in Word or Google docs, you will love this. Even with bookmarks, it’s difficult to navigate through an 80,000-word document in Word. Scrivener’s Binder, plus the split-screen mode, makes it so easy to find what you’re looking for.
Corkboard View
You’ll notice three buttons at the top (a page, a grid, and lines of text) that toggle different views. We’re currently in document view, but if you select your draft and then corkboard view, you’ll see your chapter displayed as cards. You can rename chapters straight from here. You can also add chapter summaries. It will automatically pull sample text from the chapter as the description unless you add one yourself.
Corkboard mode is useful because you can get a bird’s-eye view of your chapters and/or your scenes. You can move them around easily. Doing so will also move it in the binder.
This is really useful for when you outline or work on your novel’s structure. You might do this at the beginning or at the end of your draft, depending on if you’re a plotter or a discovery writer (also referred to as a pantser, because you write by the seat of your pants). I’m a bit of both—I do a bit of outlining at the beginning and I restructure in the second draft, so I use this mode all throughout my process. I like it because you can move scenes around and see if they fit better elsewhere, and if you don’t like it you can move it back.
Research Folders
Scrivener has features that aren’t just about the actual writing of the novel, and one of these is the ability to add more folders below your Draft folder. The Research folder is there already. You can hit the green button to add text or folders beneath it.
How I Organize My Projects
You can add as many folders and documents as you want under your Draft. Every writer is different and will want different items, but I like to add folders called Notes, Outline, and Characters.
If you want more folder icon options, can also go to “Icon from Text” and it will give you all these emoji options.
Customization and Themes
Scrivener comes with several built-in themes, which you can access by going to Window and selecting Themes.
If you want to customize the appearance of Scrivener, go to File > Options > Appearance. From here you change most things, including typefaces and colours. You can also find free and purchasable themes that others have made if you don’t want to do it yourself. Make sure you choose ones for your operating system, as the Mac theme files aren’t compatible with Windows and vice versa.
Five Useful Tools
Finally, let’s go over five cools tools. Like themes, these are extra bells and whistles you don’t NEED to know, but you might find them useful.
1. Session Targets and Word Count Goals
Access these by selecting Project and Project Targets. Here, you can give yourself a target word count for your entire manuscript. Let’s say you want your manuscript to be 90,000 words by the time you’re done. And you can also give yourself a session target. So, say you want to write 500 words today. And then there are some other options here, like resetting the session count every day, counting text written anywhere in the project, etc.
So if you know how long you want your novel to be or you’re doing a novel-writing challenge, this is handy.
2. Name Generator
The second tool on my list I only just discovered, so I haven’t played around with this one much, but you can go to Edit > Writing Tools > Name Generator. There’s a bunch of settings here, like “attempt alliteration” and “obscurity level” and various ethnicities.
3. Snapshots
The third tool is Snapshots, and if you only take one tool from this to use, choose this one. Open your Inspector panel by hitting the blue circle on the upper right. I didn’t really cover the inspector much but you can add synopses and notes here as well. Then hit the camera icon. And then hit the plus button, and it will take a snapshot of the document you’re in. And it’ll save it and keep a copy of that draft.
This is particularly useful when you’re editing, because you can take a snapshot before you rewrite or delete a scene and then you don’t have to worry about losing it completely if you want to return to it, and you don’t have to keep multiple drafts of chapters in multiple files. And you can take as many snapshots as you want of individual text files.
4. Labels
Our fourth tool, for the organization lovers, is Labels. You can add a label to a text document by right clicking and selecting Label. The default labels are just named after colours, but you can edit this and call them whatever you want. Many writers use this feature to label chapter point of views if they’re writing a multiple point-of-view story.
You can then go to View > Use Label Colour In > Binder and it will show the label colour as a dot in your Binder.
5. Keywords
This is similar to labels, except you can only have one label per document, whereas you can attach multiple keywords. To add a keyword, go to the Inspector, and click the Custom Metadata button. And you can add keywords here. You may want to use keywords to keep track of plots and subplots.
One way to look at these is by going to the view I haven’t talked about, which is the Outliner. This mode gives you a bunch of information. You can see the chapter labels here. And it’s not showing keywords, but you can change that by going to this little, difficult to notice arrow in the corner of the screen and check off “keywords.” Now it’ll show you the label colour.
And that is it for this Scrivener tutorial. Hope you find it useful!
Published Feb 1, 2024
Transcription added Sep 17, 2025
