No chapter and no scene is a stand-alone thing. There are people, places, events and plot points described and revealed in each.
To keep track of what happens where, why, with whom, you can link items to each and any document.
To help you save time and speed up the process of extracting names and terms from existing documents, NovaScriber has a helper in places, that shows you all words found in your document, that start with a capital and — therefore — might be names.
Start: left mouse click
Right-click on the area below the “Related items” area in the side bar, to add a related item.
You have the choice of different sort of items, depending on the mode you are writing in. In this case: “story writing”.
By selecting the type of relation, you will open a popup.
New or existing item?
The moment you start typing the name of the related item, NovaScribe will do a search in all existing items of that same type. In the example above, that is a plot-point, named “Ring”.
If your related item already exists (shown on the side), simply click on it and it will be added to your document. If it is a new item, complete the name, add a brief summary and either click “Add plotpoint” or “Add and edit”.
For fast editing, you can simply add it and edit it later. As you will see later here, it is quite simple to edit existing items from where you are right now.
Changing item type
It is possible, you want the item to be of another type than your originally selection. Click open the “Type” drop down and select the proper type instead.
The same goes for items already in your project tree.
Change type of existing items in tree
Right click on an item in your project tree. Select the item type it should be. Done.
Setting the rank of an item
By default each newly created item is of rank “Primary”.
But not all items are equally important in your story. For instance, your story will have main characters and a support-cast of people who are either secondary (supporting characters) or tertiary (characters mentioned by name, but of no real importance in the story). Setting the rank will help you sort and group your cast, your locations and any other item of any other type.
Click on the rank-drop down (example on “Omar Xirsi” in the screenshot above) in an item to select and set the rank of that item.
Further below, you will see how your ranking will show in your overviews.
Editing an existing item
Click on the title of an item in the side-bar next to your document and NovaScriber will open an popup with that document.
In this case, we clicked on “Argo Mutasi”.
The editor in the popup has exactly the same features and functionalities as your main editor. So here as well, you have automated backups that you can recover and here as well, you can add relations, images, descriptions and so on to the document.
By default, anything not a chapter, scene, paragraph or document, is set to “not for publishing”.
See what an item is related to
Scroll down in the side panel, to “Referenced in”, to see which documents refer to this item via a relationship.
Click on the name of each item to open the document. This allows you to do anything with that document, you can do in the main panel.
Using inheritance: linking items to chapters
NovaWriter let chapters and scenes inherit elements from parent elements. So recurring items, characters and locations can be linked to a chapter and become visible and accesible in each and all underlying chapters and scenes.
In the screenshot above, “Caro.301.B” is inherited from the chapter containing the scene. It has a blue “related” icon to indicate that its relationship is inherited.
Inheritance will help you save time and effort building your relation sets within your project.
Helper: extracting names from your document
Click on the third icon above the side panel to see: “Names and numbers”
Each time you load a document, NovaScriber will analyze the content. In this list, the result is presented of an automated search on numbers and on words that start with a capital. For each find, the number of occurrences is given as well. The order of names is the order in which they were found in your document.
Adding a name from the overview
Click on the name in the list. (This will also show you where the name can be found in your document, so you can derive the context. In this case, “Industries” is part of “Makama Industries”.)
Then select the item-type from the “Map as” drop-down below the list. Options are, among others: “Other”, “Character”, “Location”, “Concept”.
Next, a popup will be opened presenting you matching names in the same category and the option to add and edit a new item based on the given name.
As we already showed the popup, we will skip that part.
Knowing what items are already defined
Each word in the list is matched with all items you already defined in previous sessions.
Unlinked items / words are “of unknown type” and have a question mark in front. The moment an item is known in your project, it will get the icon of the type.
Looking at “Mutasi” in our example, you will see three possible matches: “Amin Mutasi – schaduwkopie”, “Argo Mutasi” and “Amin Mutasi” without any additional text. You will also notice in the screenshot, that the second option, “Argo Mutasi” has a checkmark and the text: “is linked to this document”.
Adding document and chapter-specific information
To each related item, you can add chapter- and scene-specific information, for direct reference in in your side bar and for presentation in your overviews and outlines.
Click on “Scene specific: click to add summary” to open the edit box. Click on “Save” to save the changes.
See the full text of each related item
It might not be enough to simply know what items are linked to a specific document. For instance: when you need to get a certain detail of a character, location or item. For this, you can expand each item in the side bar.
Click on “Show full description” on the item you want to expand. This will load the text and images you added to that item.
In this case: Nomi Xirsi Nandana Kang.
See what items are linked in sub-elements
Click on a chapter and scroll down in the side panel.
You will see all items linked to the children of that chapter, as NovaScriber collects and aggregates them automatically for you.
This is especially useful when you want to know what your chapters cover. Which characters? What places?
Ranking items in “Related”
As said before, we aggregate per chapter what related items we found in child-elements. This overview shows you that aggregate and allows you to access, rank and edit each one of them.
Primary items are white. Secondary are light grey, tertiary and items ranked lower are dark grey. Sorting is done on rank, then name.
Change the rank of an item and it will immediately be moved to the proper place.
Report of related items in your outline
Related items are reported in your outline as well, and here as well, sorted on rank and name.
To safeguard readability of the outline, the outline is limited to show only primary and secondary characters and only the primary items for actions, plot points, locations and all other types.
Secondary items are presented in a smaller font.
Related items in the “Plot” view
Related items are presented, per chapter, in a matrix under plot view.
This matrix allows you to see how many of each type are linked to each chapter, as a sum of direct linked items and aggregated items from child-elements.
Again, items are sorted on rank, then name.
The icon of each item in this view, moves through shades of grey, depending on the rank of that item. Black is primary, mid-grey is secondary and light grey is teritiary and lower.
As anywhere else, you can add chapter-specific descriptions to each item in this view.
NovaScriber 