One of my favorite things about Scrivener is being able to have a folder for each chapter and a text for each scene. I love being able to drag and drop for easy reordering, and I especially love being able to identify which scene or chapter I’m looking for based on the title I gave it. For that to be useful, though, I have to give each one a title that completely gives away what happens in it. In my finished manuscript, I don’t want there to be chapter titles beyond “Chapter 1” and “Chapter 2”, so how do I hide my spoiler-filled titles when compiling?
Luckily, this is pretty easy once you know where to go. When you click on Compile, you’ll probably see something like this the first time.
Looks pretty simple. You can pick a format and a document type to save as. But if you click the blue downward-facing arrow, you get a lot more options. If you click over to the Formatting tab, you’ll see a lot more options. It can be difficult to figure out what the types listed mean, but luckily when you click on one in the list it will highlight an example of that type. Using this method, I can see that “Level 1+” is for my chapters and their titles, while “Level 2+” is for my scenes and their titles. From there, it’s easy to make sure the “title” box for both is unchecked.
Now when I compile, my finished manuscript will look like this:
Instead of this:
I hope this helps you out if you were trying to figure out how to accomplish this. Otherwise, I hope it gave you an idea of something to try out if it would be helpful for you to organize things the way I do. You will want to keep chapter titles showing if you created them intending readers to see them, of course, but if you actually want scene titles showing and they weren’t before, this method could help you as well. I imagine it could be useful for rotating point of view novels, where each scene could be titled with the name of the character whose viewpoint you’re jumping to, or perhaps for books that jump around in time and want each scene to start off with a date. Whatever the case, I hope you’re able to accomplish the effect you’re going for with a minimal amount of headaches.
Shannon Fallon 