<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-15-18-33.png"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-6102" title="Binder" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-15-18-33.png" alt="" width="226" height="451" /></a>Pulling out the Mac to take a look at Scrivener 2 proved an interesting way to spend a few hours. First, Scrivener for Windows. No, you won't be reading anything from me here on that right now. It is clearly a very early beta and I don't have anything to say about it that you won't find in the earlier articles about Scrivener for Mac here. Just hit the Scrivener tag on the right.

But Scriv 2 is a very new beast in some respects, not that I noticed this at first glance. I'll put up a few things I've noticed as they come. I am, I should say, in between gigs as it were, waiting on going to Italy for some research. That's my excuse anyway. So, on to characters and locations... which get beefed up greatly.

Several writing apps have special parts of the program for characters and locations. They've never grabbed me much. Scrivener has now joined the club. If you look down the Binder you can see the templates for them (this is based on the standard novel template that ships with the app).

Piece of cake to use. You go into the Characters or Places folder and create a document based on the relevant template. The template sheets themselves are lower down and can be edited. Which means you can take out the bit in the character one which talk about conflicts and stuff (I prefer something simpler).

Here's a character (can't think where I got that photo???)

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-15-10-55.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-6104" title="Character" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-15-10-55.png" alt="" width="490" height="280" /></a>

Here's a simple location entry.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-15-12-13.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-6103" title="Location" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-15-12-13.png" alt="" width="490" height="366" /></a>

Fair enough. But Scrivener now lets you link things all over the place. So if you're thinking about your location and you want to link it to a character you just do this.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-15-12-37.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-6105" title="Link" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-15-12-37.png" alt="" width="490" height="318" /></a>

And now we have it on record that dear Harriet is connected to the location. Simple stuff, and I'm not convinced I'd be able to make use of it frankly. But if you were writing a big, many character tome maybe it would be useful. And you can link pretty much anything this way -- scenes, web pages, research.

It's pretty cool but the best thing of all is you can tailor this to the way you work. Let's add a new folder called Themes and give it an icon to make it stand out.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-15-29-58.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-6107" title="Icon" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-15-29-58.png" alt="" width="449" height="639" /></a>

Then let's duplicate the location sheet and tailor it for tracking the themes in our story, and the scenes and research and other elements which will support them.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-15-35-43.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-6108" title="Themes" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-15-35-43.png" alt="" width="490" height="320" /></a>

Now <em>that</em> is quite something. At least it is for me.