Is it better to save each chapter in a separate word document or all in one document?
I'm new here.
In the past, I've written countless articles for newspapers, and I almost never needed to edit more than a page or two. However, I have agreed to edit an entire (existing) novel for its second edition/re-print.
I'm planning to use MS Word for this.
Is it better to re-write/edit each chapter in a separate word document or is it better to save everything to one file?
I plan on editing 1-2 chapters per day, which roughly equals 10-12 pages. There's a total of 502 pages in the book.
Thanks in advance for your help and advice.
PS: The book will be available in both paper and electronic formats.
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2 answers
This may not answer your question, but it is something I have done.
Pros I found:
- You manage smaller files and are not dealing with the entire story. It is easier to find your place and manage when editing.
- If the file gets corrupted or something happens, it will only affect that chapter and not the whole thing.
(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.)
The cons I ran into:
- 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.
(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.
- 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. Some chapters I seldom bothered to look at so ended up weaker. (the intros and dreaded "chapter 1's"
(still trying to sort that through and wondering how to change what ended up a series of short stories into an actual novel.)
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.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32233. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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If part of your editing is checking continuity, it becomes difficult to search through 20 separate files for previous mentions of "Allen" to see if his hair (or lack of it) has been mentioned before Chapter 21, or if there was another character called "Allen", or if the receptionist was called "Mary" or "Marcy" the first time we met her.
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