Organizing Years of Scattered Worldbuilding with Scrivener

One of my primary goals over the past month has been to flesh out and solidify the world of Lightning and Thunder. This world has existed in my brain for somewhere around a decade (and I’ve published snapshots of it in Short Story Collection vol. 1), but it took me until now–writing a longer project in that setting–to finally compile all of my notes into one place, flesh out more specifics in areas where I’ve been banking on aesthetics and general principles, and iron out the inconsistencies that have popped up over a decade of scattered note-taking.

If you’ve been around for a while, you may have noticed that I have a pretty consistent worldbuilding process in terms of organization (usually one running document of notes that has information from it gradually transferred into World Anvil for better organization and presentation), but I also adapt to the needs of whatever world I’m working with. For this project, I decided that the best way to parse through everything and reference it neatly would be with Scrivener* (though I also intend to use World Anvil* as the presentation platform for this world in the future). Today, I’m laying out what that process has looked like for this world and how I’ve put Scrivener’s various features to work for this project, in case it’s a process that appeals to you too!

*This post contains affiliate links, marked with an asterisk. Purchases made through these links earn me a small commission at no extra cost to you.

An Overview of Scrivener’s Display

Before we dive into how I’ve used various Scrivener features, let me give you some context of what the Scrivener display looks like and what elements I’ll be referring to. This is the basic Scrivener display:

To the far left, you have the “binder” index.

In the middle, you can see the “corkboard” of “cards” that represent each document within the selected folder. These show up with their titles, colors based on their labels (when applicable), and notes beneath the titles (none of these particular cards have custom notes on them, so they display the first bit of text from inside the document instead.) Above this, there are options to switch your view of the folder from “corkboard” to “composite” (or the “outliner” view, but I’ve never used that one).

Off to the right is the “inspector” sidebar, which displays the “card” for whatever document you have selected at the top, with notes below. There are other tabs as well that can be useful, but I’m not making use of them for this particular project.

This is what the display looks like for an individual document:

It’s pretty much the same, but here I’ve selected one where you can see that the “card” section of the “inspector” sidebar reflects the description and label color of the document just as it would in its containing folder’s “corkboard” view.

Later on, you’ll also see what the “composite” view looks like and more of those labels and descriptions in use.

The Initial Collection

The first step of this process was simply to collect all of the notes I had on Concordia from their various documents into one central Scrivener project. I’m cautious of deleting anything (plus, a few of these documents had comments on them from author friends, which I wanted to have on hand for future reference), so I didn’t delete any of the original documents, but I did copy and paste each one into its own page in Scrivener. In titling these, I included the date(s) of the original document, as well as where I could find it again later, like so:

As you can see, I’m using the format of “Document title – Date (Original location).” I kept the dates as specific as I could find; some had clear dates marked, some did not, and some I couldn’t find a date on at all. I’ve also kept the document title exactly the same as on the original, so that they’re easy to search for in their original locations should I need to reference said originals. That’s why some of these have really generic or odd titles, lol.

As I’ve compiled and developed more of these, I’ve maintained the same format in titling them for the sake of consistency and ease of organization. Date is particularly important for this world’s notes, because I have notes spanning so many years and having the dates readily visible lets me see which are newer vs. older when I’m considering which conflicting notes to keep or toss.

After taking this screenshot, I grabbed more notes from World Anvil and also wrote up new notes in the 30 Days of Worldbuilding workbook by Angeline Trevena which I copied over into text form so that, again, everything would remain in one place and readily accessible:

Note Sorting & Reference

Once everything was in one place, I had to categorize it. Most of my worlds are organized by nation because those are the biggest delineations in how I use the world; for Concordia, however, I mainly focus on a singular continent and the bigger distinctions are between eras. Thus, my top-level folders cover the various eras of the world in order. Beneath those, I have categories for areas of development: technology, key organizations, government, military, etc. Originally, I also had a section for the magic system and its related elements within each era, as you can see below:

(I also added, early on, the time-spans of each era for easy reference.) As I was working with the project, however, I realized that it was obnoxious to have to hunt through the various eras for notes on magic and so on, which remain somewhat consistent over time, so I added a separate top-level folder for the magic system and its associated notes:

Within each of these folders, I’ve taken my compiled notes from the first section and divided them up based on topic. So while one document in the “Compiled Notes” section might cover ten topics, I’ve copied and pasted those into ten separate files that are sorted into “Categorized Notes” folders accordingly. While this makes for lots of very brief files, right now, it allows me to see what I have and haven’t already developed in a certain category and to have all of my notes on a given topic in one place, without the clutter of other topics. If I want to see a note in its original broader context instead, I can always just hop back over to the document I pulled a note from in “Compiled Notes” to see what it was connected to.

Here’s an example of the detail I might split these notes into, in the “corkboard” view:

Then, if I want to see everything in a given category, I can switch over to the composite view and it will display everything from a given folder in a single document (the images above and below show the same folder, just in these two different views):

There are a couple of things I’ve done to keep these smaller notes straight. First, I’ve used the “corkboard” view to make notes on each file’s “card” of what original document it came from (which allows me to reference the document’s date) or, for newer notes that went directly into a category, the date on which it was started. Like so:

The colors of the cards indicate their level of development. I’ve used Scrivener’s “label” function to see at a glance which notes are in progress, need more consideration, have been scrapped in favor of something else, etc. Here’s my key:

I’ve also set these to display in the “binder” sidebar, so that I don’t have to go into a folder to see the colored cards of the documents within it, but can see these labels at a glance in the index as well:

The abbreviations after titles in the magic folder refer to eras (Stone Era, Golden Era, Titanium Era), so that I can keep all of my magic notes in one place but also know which era each note is most relevant to. While there is overlap (especially in some of the more basic technical notes), some details of the magic system really are pretty specific to a given era. GenDevs don’t exist until the Titanium Era! Tacking era abbreviations onto note titles is how I’ve balanced having everything in one place but also seeing what era each note best relates to.

Wrapping Up

This system is newly developed, so I’ve only tested it but so much. That said, it’s serving me well so far and there are a few features I can say make it optimally useful (at least for me), besides the Scrivener-specific features I’ve already shown off (different folder views, labels, etc.).

Consistent titling – This makes it easy to find what I need, as well as to name new documents with minimal mental effort.

Dates on everything – I try to keep dates on all my writing notes anyway because I like to be able to see progression of story ideas, world development, etc., but this is especially helpful with a long-in-development, scattered, sometimes conflicting compilation of worldbuilding notes.

Flexibility in categories – While titling and dating is consistent, organization of folders and categories can be more flexible depending on the needs of an era, etc. For example, returning to the first “note sorting” screenshot, you can see that I have “science and technology” as a single sub-folder for the Stone Era, but I have individual folders for “technology: ID chips,” “technology: transportation,” etc. in the Titanium Era. I’ve tried to balance consistency and flexibility in this system.

Multiple “views” – Obviously, part of this is a feature of Scrivener itself with its corkboard view and composite view, etc. But part of it I’ve built into the system myself, as I have my “compiled notes” where I can see everything in the context in which it was originally written, as well as my “organized notes” in which I can view things topically.

Tracking progress – With my progress labels, I can easily see which elements of the world need more work, which are finalized, and which ideas have been scrapped and can usually be ignored. This is especially useful while I have particular topics I’m working to flesh out and finalize, as I can easily see where to focus on developing things from scratch, where I just need to solidify what’s already there, and where I’m already good to go.

This system may not work for every author or every project, but it has been really helpful for me in collecting scattered and conflicting notes and putting them in usable order, so if that’s something you’re dealing with as well, Scrivener* might be the right tool to help!

Have questions or feel like there was something I didn’t cover? Comment or send me an email!

Have you ever used Scrivener for your worldbuilding before? What does your process for that look like? Do you have another tool you prefer? Comment and share your thoughts!

Scribes & Archers

Building worlds with impact