Writers differ immensely in how much they plan before sitting down to actually write the manuscript. Once you’ve chosen your system of organizing the story information and manuscript, you’re ready to move on to the next step. It’s a very common choice for organizing manuscripts. Both of these options include a sidebar in the document that can show all your chapter titles so you can easily navigate between them.įinally, I’d be remiss to ignore Scrivener, a desktop application for writing books that offers the ability to reorganize entire chapters by just dragging and dropping - something that neither Word nor Google Docs can do. For a more robust solution, check out Microsoft Word. It has everything you need to write your novel, though people do say it can struggle a bit on slower computers with really long documents. There are a lot of options in this area as well, also ranging from free to paid.įor the simplest free manuscript editor, check out Google Docs. You’ll need somewhere to actually write your manuscript. You’ll want to continually update it as you write so it’s always there as an aid when you get stuck or forget a key detail. The particular system you choose isn’t all that important - what matters is that you find one that works for you and you stick to it throughout the writing process. It’s certainly not necessary to follow along with this guide and write your first book, but it’s worth checking out if you want to get organized!

We suggest Campfire Pro, the writing software that we make here at Campfire Technology.

Story Planning Software - There are software programs designed specifically for keeping track of story information.

Then, whenever you need one of those details, you can just search for the character in the spreadsheet and navigate to the correct column. For example, you could have a spreadsheet for your characters, with each row corresponding to one character, and each column corresponding to an attribute like “eye color”, “height”, or “backstory”.

Spreadsheets - This involves using Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, or smarter spreadsheets like AirTable to store information.

However, this method isn’t quite as organized as the options below, so read on. If you go this route, I’d suggest organizing it under the following headers: characters, world, and plot.

A Plain Old Document - This could be in the form of a Google Doc, Microsoft Word document, etc.

Here are a few, sorted from least structured to most structured: Luckily, there are a variety of tools available to help you with this sort of organization, both free and paid. This can be everything from character traits and backstories to extensive lore about the story’s setting. To start, you’ll want to establish a system of keeping track of little bits of information about your story. This a bad idea unless you really know what you’re doing.

You may be tempted to dive right into the writing part. You should spend your first week getting comfortable with a system to organize this information.

Rough draft books