Manuskript. Software for writers - 4

In this post I want to touch on the outline and start with the writing.

Outline

The outling gives a lot of information about the story structure. How many chapters do we have? Open a chapter by clicking the > in front of it and see the scenes. Each scene will show you if a POV character has been defined, a label and status (more about that later), the Compile checkbox (ditto), the word count and the % of the goal for the scene, if you set that. You also see the one-line and multi-line summary of the particular scene.

This is a handy view to quickly skim through the scenes, in case you're looking for something you remember. If you just want to search, there's another tool. For that, we go to Writing.

Writing

On the left side of the writing pane, we find the chapters and scenes area.

Here you can see the chapters and scenes, and add new scenes, using the + at the bottom.

If you want to add a new chapter, you click the folder icon 📁 to the left of the + sign.

Note: you can add folders inside folders, so if you work with sub-chapters (does that even exist?), that is what you can do.

A new scene is added below the item you selected, so if you were to add a scene here, it would go between 'The beginning' and 'News on TV'.

You can drag and drop scenes inside a chapter, or between chapters, if you so desire, and you can also rearrange the chapters. Remember, pressing F2 (or the equivalent on a Mac computer) will allow you to change the name of the chapter or scene, depending on what you selected in this view.

Finally. The real writing.

This happens in the center part, where the story gets its body. As previously said, Manuskript stores its information in flat text files, and uses MarkDown to format text like italics and bold. Write 1 asterisk in front and behind a word or selection for italics. Alternatively, put the cursor in the word, or select the phrase you want to italicize, and press ctrl-i. Add two asterisks or press ctrl-b for bold. Mac users, that's probably Command-i and Command-b.

On the right side we have the properties.

Here you set the POV character (or leave it empty).

You can set a status of a scene. The defaults are "empty", "To do", "First Draft", "Second Draft" and "Final". In a settings area of the program, you can alter those to your liking if you want.

The Label can be "empty", "Idea", "Note", "Chapter", "Scene" or "Research". As you saw in the outline part, that helps in the quick view of your project.

Now we have the "Compile" checkbox. If that is on, and you export your work to a file, e.g. Docx, this part will be output to that file. If you switch Compile off, e.g. for ideas and research, those segments will not end up in the output file.

In this area, you can also adjust the goal for this scene or chapter.

Below this block you find areas for the one-line summary, notes and references, and a section for revisions, which I will cover in the next post.

Thank you for reading this far.