Update: My template is available now and attached to this post.
[What follows below is a more coherent telling of what is in the video. It is not an exact transcript of what that Godzilla character is trying to say.]
Hey everyone, Greg here.
This is a quick follow-up to my introduction to Scrivener1 yesterday, as some of you had questions about my comics template.
To be honest, I don't have a version of the template that I can hand out just yet because what I use includes too many proprietary things. I need to cull several things from my workspace before I can post it to the substack, but that is my intention.
I wanted to talk briefly about some of the key reasons why I like Scrivener and why it works for me. Specifically:
1) I have no memory
Scrivner files are actually more like Zip archive files. On your hard drive, it'll appear as one single file (hopefully, you found this out when you were doing the tutorial), but it's really more of an archive - inside, there are individual documents. This is very different from, say, a Microsoft Word document. This allows you to have very disparate things in one single collection and only print the things that need to be printed at a given time.
In my current workspace, I have a script for what I hope will eventually be a middle-grade prequel to The Lump Sum Saga. I've also got an outline and placeholders for the first few issues of TLSS setup. “Only the Fate of the World,” the comic that I Kickstarted, is here too.
For someone like me who has no memory, it makes it easy to go back and check something from earlier in the series story arc. When you have no memory, even being able to go back and check character names is useful. Having the entire universe in one place is pretty fabulous.
2) The research section
Another thing about Scrivener that really works for me is the research section. I've got things saved, like an article about what life on a tidally-locked planet would be like. The alien world in my story has one half that is always dark and one half that is always light.
Today, I'm working on a speech by the equivalent of a president about space flight. So, I looked up President Kennedy's address at Rice University. And that research is now saved in Scrivener, so when I go to actually write my character’s speech, I can use split screen, and it is right there as a reference.
3) Moving panels easily
Another thing I love about using Scrivener is more pragmatic. With comics, as opposed to prose, one of the obvious things that's very different is the use of panels. With my template, I can easily move an individual panel to a new page. When I compile the resulting script into a Microsoft Word document, Scrivener will automatically renumber everything.
I find new things to love about this program every day. It's complex, but only when you push its limits. You could technically just use it like Microsoft Word if you really wanted to; that'd be lame, but that sort of defeats the purpose of using this sophisticated tool.
I can’t post my template yet, but it’s coming. I have a lot of things in my workspace that I really can't share as they are not mine…things like notes I've taken from classes and books. But once I've removed these extras, I'll post the template to the substack. It is coming.
Full disclosure: This is an affiliate link.
Scrivener 00: Comic Template Preview