How to Use Scrivener's Cork Board

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, chances are likely that you know my love of flashcards. Or rather, my love of plotting with flashcards. For me, flashcards to plotting is the cheese to my macaroni (that is to say, yum). 

So now that I’ve officially written a full manuscript from first plot bullet to final polished word in Scrivener, I’d like to share with you my favorite feature of all time: the cork board.

The cork board is actually the feature that sold me as far as buying Scrivener goes, and what I love about it is that it allows me to combine my plotting with flashcards method that I’ve grown to adore over the years, with the simplicity and beautiful organization of the computer. (Plus the lack of cramping hands is a pretty nice bonus, too).

So when you open up the cork board view in Scrivener, it looks a little like this:

Or rather, it looks like that if you have some plot points and blurry Photoshop magic at your disposal. But you get the idea.

On the left, you have a list of all of the flashcards on the board. Every flashcard can be titled, with a little summary section that you can fill in while plotting. I use this to lay out my initial plot long before I’ve written a single word in the WIP.

As you write up flashcards, you can move them around, re-title them, delete them, or label them. The manuscript in the screenshot above is a dual-POV MS, so I repurposed the labels to mark the POVs of my two POV characters, which allowed me to keep an eye on the distribution of the POV while plotting and changing things around later on.

Once you’ve finished plotting and you’re ready to start writing, you can open up each flashcard to look like this:

The great thing about Scrivener is that it works in scenes, so every flashcard you open up and type in will be saved in that card. If you decide during revisions that you need to move a scene earlier or later, you can easily do so by going back to the cork board (or using the menu on the left) and dragging it to where it’s supposed to be. For anyone who’s had to cut and paste a scene from one section of an MS Word doc to another, I promise you this is a million and two times easier.

So that’s basically it. Scrivener’s cork board is simple, the organization is beautiful, and quite frankly, I hope to never have to plot without it again.

Have you played around with Scrivener’s cork board feature? If so, what did you think? 

Twitter-sized bites: 

Not sure how to use Scrivener's cork board? Writer @Ava_Jae shares her love for this great plotting tool. (Click to tweet)  

Do you use Scrivener's cork board feature? Share your experience at @Ava_Jae's blog. (Click to tweet)