Is it better to save each chapter in a separate word document or all in one document?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.)

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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.

Answer 3

If you are a freelance editor working with a book publisher then the commissioning editor who chose you for the project should be able to provide you with very specific file delivery instructions. These can vary from publisher to publisher. In some cases freelance editors are expected to typeset the manuscript according to the publisher's style manual and deliver a complete InDesign file. In other cases typesetting will be done in house and an MS Word document from the freelance editor is sufficient.

In my experience multiple files should preferably be avoided and, when possible, the entire manuscript should be edited and delivered in one document. This decreases the risk of mixing up different file versions and lessens the administrative burden on the commissioning editor who will be sending the file to print.

Answer 4

I would use one document to re-edit all chapters, all 502 pages.

• less effort: you don't have to open multiple files, searching and looking back is faster. On the other you may get distracted faster.
• less messy: only need one file which has all chapters.
• less risk on file naming mistakes. Be sure to use good file naming. E.g. my-book-edit-20180201.doc or my-book-edit-ch07.doc

Considering you would need about two months to edit everything you should treat it as a project. You could use project management or note taking software (e.g. OneNote or Google Keep). Alternatively, use pen and paper to take notes and log difficulties.

To manage the content:

• 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.
• comments: MS word and Google Docs allow to input comments which can be resolved. Very useful to manage and review edits in one log.
• version control: Google Docs has version control allowing you to view previous versions.
• file searching: Ctrl+F quickly brings you to what you want to find. This is more efficient in one file.
• search & replace: Ctrl+H globally replace all characters you want to change. This is faster done in one file, unless you only want to change characters in only one chapter.
• headlines parsing: if you need to have chapters in separate files a simple Python or Ruby script can identify headlines and parse the data. Also there may be add-ons available in MS Word and Google Docs to this.

Good luck!

Answer 5

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. It made me consider whether that had been the best approach in the longrun.

I think it was.

I used iaWriter, which has plain text embeds, so my main document was basically a list of scenes in a play. I popped each open to edit it, but from the main document I could easily bring up the full text in the preview mode. This made moving scenes around really easy, and removing scenes especially awesome. 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.

It was annoying occasionally.. especially if the boundaries of the scenes wanted to change.. or saving out a copy to get an overall wordcount. 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.

But once it had been finished one time.. working on further edits, it made more sense to be to have it together as a cohesive whole. So I saved out the whole script and started editing that.

Overall I really liked how free I felt writing on a chapter when it wasn't part of the main thing, really. But your mileage may vary!

Answer 6

It might be worth looking into specialized tools. One of them is Scrivener. It sort of allows you to both have it all in one file, and every scene in one separate file. Works best on Macs but is available on Windows and IOS. If you use Word, my experience is that the best way is to do it as one document.

It depends a bit on what type of editing you are doing. Part of editing is "micro" level, changing words or spelling or things like that. There it helps to have it as one document -- quite simple to do a replace on the full document. Another type of editing is more "macro", moving whole parts of the story around. Here, dividing into different scenes may help.

Regardless, design a backup plan and backup often. Copy backups to different media in order to safe against hardware trouble.

Answer 7

In my humble opinion, it's better to have one big file.

(a) As Amadeus notes, if you have to search for something it's easier with one big file. Checking continuity is one example, but I routinely do all sorts of searches in my work-in-progress. "Didn't I mention X before?" "Oh, I just thought of something I need to add to the discussion of X." "My friend who did some proof-reading for me said there's a mistake in the discussion of X." Etc. I MIGHT remember which chapter something is in. But I might not. And why waste brain cells remembering exactly what's in each chapter when the computer will do that for me?

(b) It's easier to move things around. I often say, Oh, wait, I originally planned to explain this in chapter 10 but something in chapter 5 is dependent on that, I'd better move it from chapter 10 to chapter 5.

(c) You say you're using Word. Word can automatically build tables of contents, lists of illustrations, etc. But that requires everything to be in one file.

(d) It's just easier to move back and forth. If you assign a heading style to your chapter titles, Word will give you a list of chapters in the left bar. Then if you're working on chapter 4 and remember something you want to look at or change in chapter 3, you just click on "chapter 3". With separate files. You'd have to open another instance of Word, find the other file, and load it. Okay, that doesn't take hours, and if you do it once a week maybe no big deal. But I often find myself going back and forth constantly.

I'm hard pressed to think of an advantage to having many small files. Twenty years ago when you had to fit a file on a floppy, and when it might take a long time to read a file, I'd break up documents like that. But not today.