Hi I didn't know if to post here or in the general writing section however it does concern software as well so here goes... I will be using open office or libre office suite and as this will be my first attempt at writing I was wondering if you save your work as a whole project or do you save your chapters separately ? Also I might feel the need to write some chapters before others so not necessarily in the correct order. Any thoughts as to what I need to be doing to manage these aspects of starting out. Thanks in advance
I write in Word and I don't do outlines, so I write and save it as a complete story, adding on as I go. I have Scrivener, but I'm far more comfortable with Word. It wouldn't be much different though to save them as chapters, and then later, when you've decided on the order, put them all in line. Generally, however it works best for you (which may take a little while to figure out) is good. We all do things a little differently than everyone else.
I use Libre and open Office and I save by chapter. Also in my recent WIP I wrote hundreds of scenes out of order and saved them in 20 page segments under the titles Details 1, 2, 3 etc. When I decided to start my first draft I went through the files copying and pasting each segment and filing them according to what I felt were natural sections in my story. My book follows four distinct changes and I separated them that way and titled them accordingly. For instant in my WIP a boy is hired for a TV series but the filming doesn't start for months - that section prior to the TV show I dubbed KAVADO, EFF and FINLAY because those are the major scenes involving those characters. The scenes during the filming where dubbed - MOONFALL. etc. When I started my first draft I saved by Chapter ( and always have backup copies ) and when I need to find a particular scene I use the word search feature in open office to find it. It sounds complicated but it's not. I like to keep the chapters separate because it's less bulky - sometimes I even name them (for my own benefit) to allow myself to better find certain scenes.
I'm with @Trish in that I prefer Word to anything else I've used. However, I tend to not have a single doc, because I write scenes as they come to me and then, once I have a critical mass, I put them in order and fill in from there. Don't sort out chapters and whatnot until the end. And I concur with the sentiment that you ought to find what works best for you. If I had to worry about chapters and organization as I was actually writing, I'd make myself crazy. Well, more crazy. But some people need that structure in order to make progress. So it's all in knowing how you work, and finding the tools that optimize your strengths while mitigating your weaknesses.
I've been using Open Office for a few years now mostly because it was pretty much the closest in functionality to the word program I had on my old 486. Generally when I'm writing from a single POV I write in a single file, but If I'm writing a story from a few different POVs then I put each point of view in a separate file and then integrate them in another separate file using copy/paste. For me it's faster and easier to get into a specific character voice if it's only them I'm reading when I'm trying to find where I left off. If I'm skipping ahead along the story line because I'm stuck or whatever, I make a note for myself referring to where in my outline I left off, make a couple of page breaks so I can easily pick up when scanning the document that something's missing, and then make a note telling me where in my outline I'm picking up again just to avoid confusion. I generally try not to write out of sequence too much, though. Even though I'm a hardcore plotter, character development still grows pretty naturally and I don't like having to rewrite sections I've already written because Bob decides to casually have a few drinks even though he swore off drinking 4 chapters prior and it's been a struggle ever since. It's generally a good idea to mark these changes in your outline, if you have one, as you go along. Most of my notes and planning is done by hand just because I'm usually doing them somewhere other than my desk and it's easier for me to have it somewhere next to me to reference than buried under multiple windows. Also, as advised above, make multiple backups of everything on different devices you'll think it's annoying until you actually need them, then it's like a miracle of creation.
I use word and Google Docs, mainly because trying to get used to any other word processor will halt my progress. In terms of outlining, I tend to work on these three aspects of the future story: * Quotes/lines of dialogue * Events * Characters I write down any quotes or lines that I want to include in the story, even before they've been assigned to a character. I write down any events in the plot that are notable or interesting (e.g: I'm currently working on a crime thriller so one event that I want to include eventually is a fight between the main character and an equally skilled antagonist). Once I have all that jotted down then I work on the chapters one by one, outlining the plot in a paragraphed summary and then elaborating on the plot of the chapter in bullet points. That way, when I'm finished the outline completely I can write based on the events that the bullet points describe.
Thank you for all the great advice and ideas hope to put them to good use next week when I start my character development and timeline.
If you're keen on LO, then oStorybook integrates well with it - it will help you with the organizing and structure, but you'll be left with a series of LO files, plus the main oStorybook database. oStorybook is free and has some nice tools and is still being developed. I found WriteItNow vastly superior to Scrivener and many others for novels. But it costs.
I use Word/Libre. I write each chapter as a separate file, mostly because a 300 page document becomes too unwieldy to work with. When I'm done I paste them all into one file.
I use Word, all one file. But I write from the beginning to the end, so.... No, actually, even if I was hopping around I think I'd still want the whole thing in front of me while I worked. It's easier to get a sense of context, if I need to go back and check how things happened in a certain scene I can just scroll through and find it rather than trying to figure out exactly which file I need to open to get access, etc.
I did my original WIP in separate files, for the reason you cited, I didn't know whether I would have to reshuffle chapters (I didn't). When I put them together in the second draft for editing, I included a table of contents for easy navigation, or you can use outline mode if that is available in your software package. Doing something similar for "True Believers," which is an anthology of autobiographies. Each person (about ten) submitted their own story (beginning/middle/end) as an individual file, which I assembled into one document. Now I am extracting a segment of each person's story, so they are synchronized in time... everyone's story of the beginning, everyone's story of the middle, everyone's of the end. I am finding outline to be really helpful for that shuffle.
