One of the greatest things about Scrivener, as I've discussed here before, is that it sees a book as a set of scenes, chapters, or parts, whatever you choose, and lets you edit them separately. This becomes incredibly useful when you start to reread or revise your manuscript. I tweak things a little to make the system work according to my workflow.

Here's how.

<!--more-->In each scene in Scrivener you can choose to have an Inspector window, below. This gives you the chance to record and see details about the individual scene in your book. As we already know Scrivener lets you keep a separate word count for each scene and section. Here are some very powerful tools to let you control the revision process.

<img class="alignright size-full wp-image-3566" title="Screen shot  2010-03-25 at 09.37.33" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/screen-shot-2010-03-25-at-09-37-33.png" alt="" width="204" height="345" />Look first of all at the dropdown window on the right. This allows you to do a number of things. You can write a synopsis for the scene and put in notes and even photos for it. Very useful during the writing, and a reminder during the revision of what was supposed to be happening here.

But honestly... I'm past this phase now. What I really want to do at the moment is record my thoughts and changes. Remember this from earlier posts: I have a complete backup of the original version and as I go through each scene I am making notes directly in the text as annotations. I wouldn't use the Inspector Notes feature here -- I'd be likely to miss something.

One of the most useful revise tools here is the Status label. This lets you mark each scene with a status. What's more you can customise the status labels too just by going to Edit . I like to have a Revise Read so I've added that into the different labels. As I go through each scene I change the label from First Draft to Revise Read.

The next phase of the process will be to go through and do another edit based on the annotations in the text. As each scene finishes I change the status to Revise Draft. Then I will print out the whole thing and go through and do a another run. If I'm happy with the scene I will switch the status to Final Draft. If not I'll simply leave it at revised and come back later.

None of this ties you into any commitment, of course. You can rewrite anything again at any point. It's simply a reminder of what you've done and how far you think it is to completion. When I was working in Word I was constantly asking myself: did I revise this? Was I happy with it? When did this happen?

<img class="alignright size-full wp-image-3567" title="Screen shot 2010-03-25 at 09.35.17" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/screen-shot-2010-03-25-at-09-35-17.png" alt="" width="200" height="141" />In Scrivener you never get those doubts. And here's one other little gem hidden by that dropdown. Whenever you edit an individual scene, even changing that label, Scrivener will record the date and time of the change.  So you know whether you've worked on it recently or not.

Once you get used to features like this you wonder how you worked without them.