Post nano novel management

So I have this 50,000 plus word thing, that with love and work might become a novel. For editing, organizing, basically stabbing at this huge pile of text what do you recommend?

I see people use various novel software what do you prefer and why at this stage?

I've come to the realization that I can't really save each chapter to an individual word document/google docs etc. and still manage it with out losing more marbles, so what's worked for you for content management department?

What kind of features have helped and/or completely drove you nuts?

Please read the existing threads on Scrivener and Storyist, not just in this forum, but also in the Sponsors/Special Offers forum. Those are the only two with which I'm very familiar, but there are others as well.

Do you have a PC or a Mac? Scrivener just came out with a PC version; the Mac version has been around a while. Storyist is only for Mac, and has a version for iPad, which is why I have it.

Really, if you read the developers' introductions in their respective threads in the Sponsors/Special Offers forum, you'll have a good idea of what each software can do.

I wanted reviews from users. It's great for a company to say it can do this and this and this and make coffee.

But I'd kind of like to know whether such and such a feature really worked for someone, is it as helpful as it sounds or are there other less publicized bells/whistles they found worked so much better for them.

Or maybe people like me who used one program combination for the big burst of writing and then needed to switch when it came down to the editing.

The other pages didn't seem to compare things much.

I would recommend yWriter - it's free, it's easy to use and it is brilliant for breaking up chapters into scenes/smaller chunks. Just paste it in bit by bit and then drag and drop into other positions if they turn out to be in the wrong place. It is made by one of our fellow Wrimos too, so you know it's well thought out. One thing though: When you download it and open it for the first time, have a look at the left hand side box where you list your chapters, and drag the divider an inch or two to the right. Now when you make a new chapter and fill in a short summary of the content, you will see some of the summary in that box and be able to fully appreciate the intuitive at-a-glance outlining beauty of it. You'll see what I mean when you try it, the screenshots don't show it. And even though it has a lot of features, don't panic - you only need to use the basic ones and then add as you go. It's here: http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html

Good luck with your editing!

I like LyX (memoir class) because every time you mark a Chapter, it gets added to your ToC which is in a menu beside your document. You can also label the remaining outline points that you haven't written yet as subsections and they'll be added to the ToC too so you can find them quickly and see where they fall in your document. LyX also handles large files much better than Libre/Open Office which is why I switched for fiction writing. If you decide to use it, don't forget to switch on the spell-checker in the Preferences panel. LyX is actually a typesetting program so it produces fantastic looking pdf files and you can get an addon that will convert to RTF files too (which can be opened in Word). There's a bit of a Learning Curve with LyX, but I didn't find it too tricky to learn. LyX is completely free and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux at www.lyx.org - the only downside is that since you have to download the MikTek libraries as well as the program, it does take up some hard drive space and installation takes time.

I use Liquid Story Binder, and PageFour on occasion, and I've also tried Scrivener. With all of these, and with yWriter (I think) you can import your novel and break it up into chunks of scenes or chapters while having the capability to easily move scenes and chapters around, and then compile it all into one big manuscript. You can also save/export your files as RTF.

PageFour is probably the simplest of these programs. I like LSB because you can do pretty much anything you can think of in it (this flexibility is why it has a steep learning curve, but once you get your own workflow figured out and understand how the different functions work together it's really quite cool). Lots of people love Scrivener; if LSB didn't exist, that's probably what I would use. I haven't tried yWriter, but I've heard enough good things about it that I feel I can recommend it; it's the only one of these four that's free for unlimited use of the full program.

In Liquid Story Binder, I use builders. A builder has a column down one side where you can list your scenes or chapters, sort of like a table of contents. When you click on one, it opens a writing window where you can write that scene. If you want to move scenes around, all you do is select the scene (or chapter) in the table of contents thing, then you can move it up or down to the right place, and the associated text goes with it. You can also insert and delete scenes. There's an Automatic Build feature where every time you save it compiles everything you've written in that builder into one manuscript and saves it as an RTF. This makes the adding-deleting-moving-scenes-around part of revision so much easier, I don't know how I ever did it before LSB.

I plan to keep working on this year's novel, and try out 3 programs (using Linux): Scrivener, yWriter, and StoryBook. I've only superficially played with them before.

During NaNo I use FocusWriter for the editor and NoteCase (outliner) for notes. But this year I wound up writing some scenes out of order, which is hard to do in a normal editor. Hence the desire to find something for organizing and writing out of order.

StoryBook seems to be the only one that really works correctly on Linux. But I have barely used it so we'll see.

yWriter technically runs on Linux via mono, but: UI fonts don't look right (usable enough but stuff overlaps or is cut off) , and the editor portion is not usable--the cursor is not in sync with the where the characters appear, and again the fonts don't look right. Fortunately you can use an external editor.

Scrivener Linux Beta seems to work OK except for having some bugs and lacking some features found in the other versions. I just started trying this one out today.

Normally I just go through it one scene at a time in Word. But I'm thinking of trying Scrivener, especially since my scenes ended up so mixed this year. I like that there's a corkboard style set up where you can rearrange scenes. I'll have to watch the tutorial a few times probably but I suspect I may like Scrivener for editing, even if I never use it for writing my first draft.

I've been playing in the Liquid Story Binder sandbox for the last few years and it's precisely because there's no need to have a ton of individual files and trying to keep track of all of them that I love this program.

Thanks to Nano, I am working on a series, and one thing I've learned to do in LSB is to keep all of the stories I write in them inside of one Binder, titled Quests of Alkebulan.

Inside of my Binder, like moonmomma, I work mainly with Builders - first with a Planner set to Builder mode for my scenes/chapters, with a separate Builder for my outlining / storyline builder

One other thing I do is because I have several stories inside of the one Binder, each story and its associated files has a prefix in front so that they all stay together in the file listing panel and makes them easy to locate and manage. For example, all files for this year's Nano have the prefix of TS_ for Taraji's Song.

I started playing around with yWriter yesterday, mostly because it was free; I tried LSB two years ago, I think, and didn't care for it very much. But this year in particular, when my friend and I are working on a massive multi-story collaboration, I think yWriter will come in handy, if we share things like character lists and locations. It's probably the best and easiest way to keep track of things.

Now I just need to convince her to try yWriter... though I wouldn't be horribly opposed to Scrivener, I suppose. It's not really expensive.

But I think we definitely need something better than Excel spreadsheets and Word files trying to keep track of things. It's just too massive of a story, spread out over too many years (okay, fine, the main chunk of the story we want to tell only takes place across 15 years, but they're a very busy 15 years.)