Scrivener-like outliner for Windows?

Posted by JohnK
Sep 24, 2009 at 01:50 PM

Yes, I had the same experience myself using Word for (very) long documents. I came close to disaster once when I was up against a short deadline. Bizarrely, I saved the day by copying the file from Word for Windows to Word on the Mac, which proved much more stable with long documents. That was many years ago (Word 2000, I think). But I never use Word for long documents now.

But agents/publishers do often request Word files, so add-ins can help. The program I mentioned above, Chapter by Chapter, just makes it very easy to manage “projects”—effectively a set of short Word documents.

So typically, if writing a novel, you would have a file for each chapter, and they would be collected into a project in Chapter by Chapter, perhaps split into sections/acts/however you work.

Chapter by Chapter just makes it easy to manage, switch between, organise and merge the Word files, keep running word counts etc.

For those not tied to Word, programs like PageFour (http://www.softwareforwriting.com/) achieve the same thing in a single interface.