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Methods to track/change "time periods" ?

Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2019 11:54 am
by -andrew-

I'm very new to Scrivener, and am wondering if there's a way to tag or otherwise identify a "time period" - in my case, high school grades - that allows us to change it later.

For example, if part of the story takes place in 8th grade, and later, I decide to make it 9th grade...

Or, it's 1983, and I'd like to change it to 1980. In this example, it might be the case that certain things that happen in a certain year (or grade) and are scattered throughout the story. I'd like to be able to identify each time-specific reference, like music from a certain year.

Has anyone had to work with something like this?

Re: Methods to track/change "time periods" ?

Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2019 12:57 pm
by rdale
I haven't had to do this, but I can see two different ways of tracking anything. If you are writing something that takes place at a particular time (the 8th grade), then you can use one of the "meta data" fields, such as Status, Label, or create a custom metadata field to store that info. Then if you decide to change it, you can just sort the outliner on that field, and find everything written for that time clumped together.

If you're just referencing these time periods in the text, "Remember that time, in the 8th grade, when we set fire to the chemistry lab?" then you should probably use keywords. Note that you want to StringYourWordsTogether, or Join_them_with_underscores, since searching for multiple words in a keyword will result in every keyword that contains any of those words. Your keywords might look like "era-8thGrade", or "StarDate-31.4.18", or however you want them to look in your list of keywords.