There’s a lot of great novel-writing software out there to help you streamline the process of writing a novel. The best of the bunch are Scrivener (for drafting) and Autocrit (for editing). That said, there’s one piece of software you’ve probably been using for years: Word. Word remains an excellent tool, especially if you like to keep all of your writing in a single document and just pick up where you left off with your story each day. If you want to stick to the basics, here are some tips on how to organize your novel in Word.

• The master folder for a novel: I keep this on my desktop. It is labeled with the novel’s title, and anything I write for the novel goes into this folder.
• The current draft file: This file is the current draft in Word, labeled with title and date.
• Research file:
• Notes file: This is the file where I type any notes to myself that I’m not putting on the physical manuscript (more about physical note-taking later). For me, this file is fairly wide-ranging. Each time I type a note, I give it a heading, such as “Idea for wedding scene” or “Add to the piece about time.” The headings are in bold. The idea is to be able to easily scan the file with my eyes and see what’s there. I also try to keep the headings specific enough that I can do a search and find what I’m looking for. I have a Notes file for each draft–and the file is named Notes along with a date. You could also call it Notes Draft 1, Notes Draft 2, etc. I just do it by date because I write so many drafts, having the date in the title makes it easy to see what is more recent, older, etc.
• Cuts file: These are scenes, paragraphs, and even sentences that I’ve cut during any stage of revision that I think I might want to add back in later. I don’t put everything I cut here! Something are just deleted and gone. This is for scenes, paragraphs, and sentences that have value and I don’t want to send into the ether. I title this Cuts-Date, so by the end I have several Cuts files.
• Once I begin revising, I make a new document for each major revision, labeled by date.

That’s really all you need to organize your novel in Word. If you want a lot of features to help you organize your research and move chapters around with ease, consider Scrivener (read my review of Scrivener here).

Although life without Word would be discombobulating, Word is pretty bare bones when it comes to organizing, so it’s a good idea to supplement it with other software like Scrivener and Autocrit. See my post on the best novel-writing software.

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