How to organise a novel on your computer

Most books start as one document, and for a while that works. Somewhere around chapter ten it starts to fight back: scrolling for a minute to find a scene, a "cut bits" section growing at the bottom, a folder holding novel_final.docx, novel_final_v3.docx and novel_final_v3_REAL.docx.

Organising a book isn't about tidiness. It's about being able to find, move and cut things without fear, and still knowing which version is the real one. This guide sets out one method that works in any tool (a folder and some files), shows it on a real example, and then shows how InkSpine sets it up for you. It works the same whether you're writing a novel, a memoir or a non-fiction book.

One long document, or one file per chapter?

Writers disagree about this, and both sides have a point.

One long document. Everything is in one place, it's easy to search, and there's nothing to stitch together at the end. The costs arrive as it grows: it gets slow to open and hard to navigate, moving a chapter means cutting and pasting thousands of words, and every saved copy is a copy of the whole book.

One file per chapter. A chapter is easy to move, a mistake stays inside one chapter, and a chapter is short enough to reread in one sitting. The costs: you need a way to see the whole book at once, to search across all the files, and to put them back together in order when it's finished.

Our view: one file per chapter, as long as something does the stitching, the searching and the whole-book view for you. Doing those three by hand is where the method breaks down. The rest of this guide sets them up.

One folder that holds the whole book

Here is a folder map you can copy, whatever you write in:

My Book/
  manuscript/      one file per chapter, numbered: 01-prologue, 02-the-road, …
  front-matter/    title page, copyright, dedication, epigraph
  back-matter/     acknowledgements, about the author, also by
  scratch/         scenes you cut, or haven't placed yet
  figures/         maps, photos and diagrams used in the text
  characters/      one note per person
  places/          one note per place

Five rules worth stealing:

1. Number the chapter files so they sort in book order: 01, 02, 03. Renumber when you move one.
2. One folder per book. Everything the book needs lives inside it, so a backup of the folder is a backup of the book.
3. Keep a scratch folder. Cut scenes go there, not into the bin and not to the bottom of a chapter.
4. Keep notes beside the chapters, inside the same folder, not in a separate app.
5. Never name a file "final". Let your tool keep the versions (more on that below), and keep one file per chapter that is always the current one.

A worked example: the demo book

InkSpine comes with a short demo book, The Ember Accord, so you can see a finished structure before you build your own. Here is how its one book, A Debt of Ash, is organised:

• Front matter: Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Epigraph.
• Chapters: Prologue — The Cinderfields, The Salt Road, Harbor Debts, then a Part Two divider, then The Ashbound Court and What the Tide Keeps.
• Scratch: one cut scene, Cut: The Wardens' Hall, kept rather than deleted.
• Back matter: Acknowledgments, About the Author, Also by Elena Voss.
• Notes: four characters (Mirena Ashvale, Toma Ferrow, Cassian Drell and Selwyn Vask), two places (Kelvhaven and the Cinderfields), one piece of lore (the Ashfall Accord) and one faction (the Ashbound Court).
• Status: the first two chapters are Final, Harbor Debts is Revising, and the last two are Draft.

It's small, but every piece of the method is there: the parts of the book that aren't story are kept apart from the chapters, the cut scene has a home, and the people and places sit in the same project as the prose. Open it from Explore the demo book on InkSpine's Welcome screen.

Give every chapter a status

A status tells you where a chapter stands without opening it. A small set is enough: Planned (outlined, not started), Draft, Revising, Final, and Cut, a chapter you've taken out of the book but want to keep. Read down the list and you can see at a glance how much of the book is really finished.

In InkSpine the five statuses show as coloured dots in the chapter list. A new, empty chapter starts as Planned and moves to Draft when you write its first word. A Cut chapter is never exported and stays out of the book's word totals.

Group chapters into parts or acts, even if they never print

Parts do two different jobs. On the page, "Part Two" tells the reader the book has turned. While you're writing, a part lets you fold the book down to the act you're working on. A book can need the second without the first.

In InkSpine, Add part or act at the foot of the chapter list groups the chapters that follow it. You choose whether the part prints as its own page in the book (with an epigraph, if you like) or only organises the list while you write and never reaches the finished book. Folded, a part shows how many chapters and words it holds, and a bar of how many are draft, revising and final.

For a collection of short stories, a book's chapter numbers can restart at 1 in every part.

Keep a place for scenes you cut

Deleting a scene you might want later is how writers lose work. Moving it to the bottom of the document is how documents get messy. A scene you've cut needs somewhere to wait that is outside the book but still in the project.

In InkSpine that's Scratch: pages that sit outside the numbered chapters, are never exported and don't count toward the book's word totals. When a cut scene finds its place again, Promote to Chapter turns it back into a chapter.

Keep notes next to the chapters, not in another app

Notes on characters, places and research drift out of date when they live in a separate notebook or spreadsheet, because nothing reminds you to update them while you write.

In InkSpine each character, location, piece of lore and faction has its own page in the same project (in a Memoir or Non-fiction project they're People, Places and so on). Names are recognised as you type them in the prose, and the panel beside the chapter lists who and what the open chapter mentions. The Workbench holds notes and to-dos you can connect to a chapter or a character; they are never exported. For the fields worth keeping on each page, see the worldbuilding template, and for making the first ones, build your first character and place pages.

See the whole book at once

A book you can only look at one chapter at a time is hard to shape. You need a view where the whole thing fits on a screen.

In InkSpine the Corkboard (⌘2, Ctrl+2 on Windows and Linux) shows every chapter as a card, with its synopsis, status and point of view, and you drag the cards to reorder the book. The Plot Overview shows which characters appear in which chapters. Story Arcs draw each storyline as a line across the chapters, so a thread that went quiet shows as a gap.

Keep every version without final_v3.docx

Copies of the whole file pile up, and before long nobody knows which is the real one. The fix is to keep one current file per chapter and let the tool keep its history.

In InkSpine your text is saved to its file as you type. A version of the chapter is saved automatically after five minutes without typing, or whenever you press ⇧⌘S (Ctrl+Shift+S). The chapter's History tab opens an earlier version beside today's text (on InkSpine Free, the three newest; Core opens them all), and you copy back the passages you want. The version comparison guide walks through it.

When it's time to make a book of it

Organised this way, the book assembles itself. Front matter, chapters and parts in order, then back matter; cut chapters and scratch pages are left out. In InkSpine the Export screen does the assembling, as an EPUB for ebook stores, a Word document or a PDF proof copy. The EPUB for KDP guide takes it from there.

Already have a draft somewhere else?

If your book is one long Word document, Import splits it into chapters at its headings: see bring a Word manuscript into InkSpine. Coming from Scrivener? See moving from Scrivener. Writing a memoir? See what a memoir needs to keep track of.

Being straight with you

• One book per project on Free. InkSpine Free keeps one book per project. A series, with book two in the same project sharing its characters, needs InkSpine Core.
• 10 entries per project on Free, shared across characters, locations, lore and factions, and 3 story arcs. Entries past 10 stay visible and readable. Your prose is never capped.
• Exporting the finished files (EPUB, DOCX and PDF) needs InkSpine Core or a free trial. Markdown and HTML export are free.
• InkSpine makes the folder for you. You choose where it lives. Each chapter is a plain Markdown file you can open in any text editor, and if one is changed outside InkSpine, the app notices when you come back to it. Arrange the book inside InkSpine, though: it keeps the chapter order and the part groupings itself, so you don't rename or move the files by hand.
• No built-in sync between computers today.

The method above works with nothing more than a folder and a word processor. If you'd rather not do the stitching, searching and version-keeping by hand, InkSpine does them for you.

In InkSpine

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