In case you haven’t noticed yet, I like colors and I like organization. I had a color system for my notes and so it shouldn’t surprise you that I have a color system for my files within Scrivener.
Here’s a picture of it:
Dark Red = Concept. Those are scenes where there’s not even necessarily a scene there. There might be simply the idea for a scene or I might just know I need a scene. It might be a bunch of attempts at writing the same scene. Basically, if I handed it to another person, they would think it was a lot of gobblty-gook.
Red = Rough Draft. This is a scene where I’ve actually written the scene, hence there is actually prose, but the scene might not be complete, there might be notes for elements I still need to add. It’s the roughest form of a scene that is actually still a scene.
Orange = First Draft. This is when I have all of the elements or ideas put into the scene, and they are in order. Doesn’t mean it’s pretty, but it’s all there.
Yellow = Second Draft. This is the first stage that I would consider ‘readable’ by a third party without explanation from me. At this stage, the scene should have all it’s elements and should flow. This is where the story needs to be for beta readers.
Green = Revised. Yes, technically I have to revise to get between each color, but green is the color where not only are all the pieces there, and it flows, but I have sat down, played with my word choice, and beautified my prose. This is the stage at which a read would hopefully be able to tell that I’m a writer, and not just some smuck.
Blue = Finished. Blue is post line-edit. This is the “and now it gets sent out to an agent” step. Blue is the best I can do.
Purple = Notes. I have notes, lots of them. You can see the ‘Notes’ folder (technically the notes file should be purple, but default for new file is red and I haven’t changed it yet.) This is so I can leave a notes file within a chapter and not get myself confused.
Magenta = OOP or Out of Place. These are scene I write where I have an idea for later (or earlier) in the story and I write it whereever I am at the time. Later it will get moved to where it needs to go, but when I’m in “words on the page mode”, stopping to do that while writing is just a distraction.
Pink = BTS or Behind the Scenes. These are scenes I write that are not part of the story. They might be from a different character’s pov or just be something that gives me inspiration or detail that I want to keep but doesn’t really fit anywhere.
Gray = Obsolete. I rewrite scenes in new files in order to not loose old versions. (I don’t like the idea or execution of Scrivener’s snapshots, so this is how I do the same thing.) The different color keeps me from accidentally reading the wrong scene and wondering why my changes aren’t there.
And as for the file structure, which yes I did leave in on purpose, you can see most of Draft 7. I am currently on Draft 8, which you can see the last chapter is ‘the hero’s return’. I know, spoilers.
The colors are also updated on the folder. The color there is the color of the lowest ranked file within that chapter. As you can see, the beginning of the story is rather clean, with all of that yellow. Later in the story things dip into a lot of rough draft.
Since I am currently revising from the end of the book forward, I hope this means that it’ll be slow going at first, but pick up once I get closer to the beginning of the story. My goal for now is to get everything to the first draft stage. Then, hopefully, there will only be a few tweaks needed to get to second draft.
It took me a week to get through one chapter. If that holds, it will take me over two months to finish this revision. I’m hoping that some of the chapters will go more quickly than that, especially the ones that are already yellow. A scene can lose it’s color if I realize there are new elements I need to have, but yellow still means the scene is rather clean to start.
