Let's talk Scrivener again and an aspect of the software that often puzzles people. This is the right hand column called the Inspector. You don't need to see it, of course. You can hide the thing altogether. But it is very useful as we've already seen for <a href="http://www.davidhewson.com/2009/10/the-dreaded-synopsis/">mapping out a synopsis</a>. And there are some other cool gadgets to play with too, particularly when you reach the revision stage.

One of the things to remember about Scrivener is that it contains a lot of tools. More than most of us would need, I suspect. So it makes sense to pick the ones that make sense to you and leave the rest to one side. I probably know sixty per cent of what's in this very rich piece of software. That's enough for me. I don't want to know it all.

So let's look at the parts of the Inspector that really work for me.

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<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/inspect.jpgblog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/inspect.jpg"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-1639" title="inspect" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/inspect.jpgblog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/inspect.jpg" alt="inspect" width="225" height="702" /></a>Here you see the full inspector bar (a little shortened for the purposes of displaying it in a blog post -- I normally work with a much longer page). The top part is for the synopsis for this particular scene. Type something in here and it will appear in the outline and corkboard view and give you a handy reference for moving scenes and chapters around at will. That's great during the writing. But the rest of the tools here are wonderful when you get round to revising your work.

You have six different options under the General heading. These are...

<strong>Label</strong>: use this for saying whether it's a scene or a chapter if you like. But you can also change the names of these labels. So they could become notes for which character has the point of view, for example. Useful: not essential in my book.

<strong>Status</strong>: This is where you can mark a scene as to do, first draft, second, revised, done... you choose. When you're revising you can go through rewriting and ticking off the parts you think are finalised. Leave those you're not sure about as Final Draft or something. Then do a simple search for every element in the book that has Final Draft as the status. Bingo: you see what's left to do. This is very powerful stuff and you can edit those labels as you see fit.

<strong>Modified</strong>: Just looks like a date stamp and it is. But think about it. This is a date stamp <em>for the time you last edited this scene.</em> Not the project as a whole. Do you ever look at something and think: did I just edit that a couple of days ago or not? Modified tells you straight away. Nothing remotely like this in a conventional word processor. Priceless.

<strong>Included in Draft</strong>: tick this if the text is something you want to appear in the final exported book. If you are writing notes or research that's outside the book leave it unticked and it won’t get exported (or counted in the word count if you set it up properly).

<strong>Page Break Before</strong>: does what it say. Tick if you want each scene in your manuscript to start on a new page.

<strong>Preserve formatting</strong>: overrides any formatting changes you make when dumping out to Word or something. Use this on part, section or chapter headings where you want some specific fonts. I don't.

<strong>Document notes</strong>. This is the place for things that aren't included in a synopsis. Such as dates or times or just general 'must do' observations. I use this in almost every scene I write. I want each element in this book to earn its keep. These notes are a way of reminding myself what each scene is supposed to achieve and what I still need to get there.

Those seven elements are something you simply can't find in conventional word processors. Perfect for creative writing in my book.

One last thing. At the foot of the Inspector you will see three little icons. The default will give you the Document Notes you'll see above. Click through the other two and you will find one panel for links and one for keywords. In links you can input a link to an external web page or another part of your project. Useful if you want to connect two sections where you need to keep going backwards and forwards and checking they make sense. Not something I use but I can see it would appeal to some people. The third icon is for keywords. You could use this for locations, characters, points of view, anything that is a kind of meta tag for the story. Then just type in the keyword in the search box and you will see every instance across the project. Again, not something I use but it may be great for you.

When I revise it's the status, modified and document notes parts I use most of all. In fact I don't know how I'd work without them now. They add a lot of control to the editing process and let me think outside the actual page, which is important. Another Scrivener win.