Writing more complex documents, like a novel, is nearly impossible without some sort of overview.
NovaWriter offers you several views on your document structure that help build and maintain your outline in an organic way.
1: Using the navigation panel on the left-hand side
You can use drag & drop to (re)organize your existing document, chapters and scenes. Right-click on any item to add new chapters and scenes to your project, or to change existing items into a different type. (A “document” into a “Character” for instance.)
2: Switching project tree to “Outline mode”
Click on the ‘outline view’ button above the project tree to switch to ‘outline mode’.
Keyboard-support: You can navigate through the view using the tab- and cursor-keys. You can add new nodes with <shift-enter> and open the document with <enter>.
3.a: Use the overviews
For several reasons, including focus and overall performance, you need to select specific chapters for reporting.
You select these chapters by right-clicking on a chapter and selecting “Show in overviews” from the context menu.
Once selected, it and all its children will have green icons, as you can see in the screenshot. To remove it from the overviews, simply right click and choose “Remove from overviews”.
3.b: Use the chapters-view
Click on the Chapters-tab to find all chapters that are part of your ‘Show in overviews’ selection. Add, complete and edit summaries for scenes and chapters in the respective cards shown above.
Right-click on the Chapters-panel to add new chapters and scenes
Drag & drop chapters and scenes in the projecdt tree. (It is disabled for now in the overview due to conflicts with selecting text in input fields. There is no date set to enable drag and drop.)
3.c: Use the extended view on each chapter
Click on the name of the chapter under “Max rank/role” to expand the items in that chapter. This will give you a better view on each document, including an overview of attached items like people and places.
3.d: Attach characters, locations and plot points
Right click on the area under ‘In this <document type>’ to attach characters, locations, concepts and plot points.
For each attached item in the list, you can add scene- and chapter-specific descriptions that will be included in your outline-reports.
3.e: Fill in the name and summary
You can use the popup to add a new element, or re-use an existing element.
If (a part of) the name of an element (person etc) has already been used, the popup will show you all matching elements, as shown in the screenshot.
Clicking on an existing item under “Matching names” list will immediately add that item to the chapter, scene or document.
3.f: Use the matrix view
Or switch to the matrix view on characters, locations, concepts and plot points, from where you add item-specific descriptions to each element.
3.g: Rank each item
Rank each attached item, to distinguish and separate primary elements from secondary and tertiary.
Good to know: Once you defined the rank of each item you can filter anything beyond a certain ranking by selection of “Show max. rank/role” in the top-part of the overview.
3.h: Click on a title to open the popup
When you click on a title in any block in the overview, you will open the document itself.
4: Use the report under the Outline-tab
The Outline-tab will show you a report of the outline on the selected chapters in the navigation panel.
If a summary is not given yet, it will print a default text: “No summay yet”.
This outline has five parts:
1: A short summary, showing only the chapters and the chapter summaries.
2: A compact report of your time line, showing what chapter and scene follows where in your time line.
3: An overview of all primary items, attached to chapters and scenes in your manuscript, grouped by type.
4: An detailed outline, showing summaries and info on all chapters, all scenes and documents within these chapters and all related elements within each scene and document. When related items have no summary for that scene or document, only the name is presented. If a specific description is available, the name will be marked bold and the document-specific summary is presented after.
Secondary characters are printed in a smaller font.
5: An extended time line view, in which all chapters and scenes / documents are presented on a time line (of sorts) in order of appearance in the manuscript.
Here as well, related items are shown per document / scene.
5: Use the outline report next to your editor
Click the “split screen” icon right next to the “Visuals” tab. Then click on “Outline” above the split-screen to present that document in the right-hand side of the split-screen.
NovaScriber 