![]() So I saved out the whole script and started editing that. working on further edits, it made more sense to be to have it together as a cohesive whole. But I decided wordcount shouldn't be a big issue and overall it really helped treat the order of things a little flexibly and some of the most exciting discoveries of the process were based on what happened when different scenes ended up next to each other sort of accidentally.īut once it had been finished one time. or saving out a copy to get an overall wordcount. especially if the boundaries of the scenes wanted to change. Because I could 'try' an order, just working with a list, but still work with the scenes individually, which helped me focus on what I was working on right then without getting distracted by scrolling up and down. This made moving scenes around really easy, and removing scenes especially awesome. I popped each open to edit it, but from the main document I could easily bring up the full text in the preview mode. ![]() ![]() I used iaWriter, which has plain text embeds, so my main document was basically a list of scenes in a play. It made me consider whether that had been the best approach in the longrun. I very recently switched from one file per chapter, to all in a single manuscript when doing a new version of a previously finished work. Also there may be add-ons available in MS Word and Google Docs to this. headlines parsing: if you need to have chapters in separate files a simple Python or Ruby script can identify headlines and parse the data.This is faster done in one file, unless you only want to change characters in only one chapter. search & replace: Ctrl+H globally replace all characters you want to change.file searching: Ctrl+F quickly brings you to what you want to find.version control: Google Docs has version control allowing you to view previous versions.Very useful to manage and review edits in one log. comments: MS word and Google Docs allow to input comments which can be resolved.outline: an outline at the left (or right) side helps with navigation and can be clicked to easily switch between chapters and see how the chapters are linearly organized.Alternatively, use pen and paper to take notes and log difficulties. You could use project management or note taking software (e.g. my-book-edit-20180201.doc or my-book-edit-ch07.docĬonsidering you would need about two months to edit everything you should treat it as a project. less messy: only need one file which has all chapters.On the other you may get distracted faster. less effort: you don't have to open multiple files, searching and looking back is faster.I would use one document to re-edit all chapters, all 502 pages. That said I am rewriting a draft and seeing how having the whole thing in one file goes and if that helps me deal with the cons I ran into. (still trying to sort that through and wondering how to change what ended up a series of short stories into an actual novel.) Some chapters I seldom bothered to look at so ended up weaker. At least for me it got to be very long (again dealing with short stories of varying length) and I had like 20+ "chapter" files with no idea how long the total piece is or how to fit it in a cohesive unit.(this came to be a huge con for me when reviewing, reading over the whole thing.) Instead of reading what would be a novel I was reading what turned into a series of short stories. Because you're only looking at a single chapter, you may be tempted to write each as if they are their own separate story or run into continuity problems if you're not looking at the whole thing as a single unit. ![]() (The 2nd one was what drove me into trying this method, back in the days there were those 3" floppy disks and one of them corrupted my word document and left computer code and formatting inconsistencies scattered throughout the whole thing.)
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