[selud]

The nested cards are definitely a great tool to create the structure. Even after the initial outline, I came back to them every now and then to re-evaluate the logic flow or to place new sub-topics that came up.

The biggest win for me was how Scrivener supports an iterative workflow. I started with keywords on the cards for what a chapter should be about, wrote a few sentences describing the keywords inside the document, added context so the sentences became paragraphs, fleshed it out and polished it. During this process I used colour labels in the outline view[1] to keep track of the state of a chapter.

All this took away the pressure to write a long, good and coherent text. I only had to increment little by little to which my brain had far less resistance. If I was stuck on a chapter or couldn't motivate myself to keep working on it, I switched to another one and do a little work here, a little work there.

Also the usual Latex applied as well: I only focussed on the content and didn't format anything properly and left placeholders for images. I used Pages (the old version with two sided layout) for the final assembly where I only had to worry about layout and not on the content.

[1]: http://www.techtoolsforwriters.com/using-labels-in-scrivener...