Tag Archives: how-to

Sometimes, you’ll write a scene, make changes to it, and then later decide that the original scene was better. When I was writing in Word and this happened, I used to copy the scene and paste it into a separate document. Then I could make changes in the original doc and if I later decided my first scene was better, I could re-copy the scene back in. This got to be a pain, especially when a scene went through multiple incarnations; I’d end up with four or five different files that all corresponded to slightly different flavors of the same scene. I wound up with a folder with files named things like Chapter2Version1CharactersGoForIceCream,Chapter2Version2CharactersGoForDonuts, Chapter2Version3CharactersGoForThaiFood, you get the idea.

Luckily, Scrivener has a built-in feature called Snapshots that manages this process for you. Let’s say you’ve got a scene that you want to tweak, but you want to be able to go back to the original version. Just press Ctrl+D, and you’ll hear a camera shutter sound effect. Then, click on the Snapshots button on the lower right toolbar to see a list of Snapshots associated with the current scene. You can create as many Snapshots as you want for a particular scene, and then restore a scene to a previous version by clicking the Roll Back button.

This short video shows Snapshots in action. Enjoy!