First, keep the entire book
manuscript in one electronic file. I know writers who use a separate file for
each chapter of their novel on their computer. Each of my novels is in one
file—the whole thing. It would drive me nuts to have to open up, let’s say, a
file for chapter 9 in order to check on information I needed for chapter 22—for
example, maybe I need to make sure where I stashed a clue that now needs to be
discovered.
A file-per-chapter writer
friend didn’t see how I could do it. The key is using bookmarks to navigate
quickly and easily around a complete novel manuscript.
With the Microsoft Word and
WordPerfect Bookmark tool, wherever you are in a manuscript you can insert a
bookmark and easily come back to it from any other place in the manuscript. One
obvious use is when you’re somewhere deep in your book, rewriting, and it’s
time to hang up your brain for the night, your eyes having become loose in
their sockets. Just insert a bookmark (I usually use the word “here”), save the
file, and shut down. Next day, you’re at the exact spot you left off with a
couple of keystrokes.
Here’s how to do it in Word:
click Insert in your top toolbar; click Bookmark; type in a letter or word in
the Bookmark name box, then click the Add button. For some
reason, you can’t use words separated by spaces—which leads me to sometimes
insert bookmarks such as “describebarn” or “describe-barn” so I’ll know what
it’s about. In WordPerfect, you click Tools, then Bookmark, then Create, which
lets you type in a name and say OK.
When you next open your document,
to go to a bookmark you type control+g (PC) or, for MACs, apple+g,
select Bookmark in the dialogue box that pops up, select the bookmark you want
(there’s a little arrow button to show a list of all bookmarks), click okay and
you’re there.
Other uses: you’re really
struggling with a passage or maybe just chugging through the narrative, laying
track, and you know it’ll need more thought. You can bookmark it and move on,
knowing you can return with ease. Using bookmarks, I will revisit material that
needs honing a number of times until I’m satisfied with it. With a bookmark, it’s
easy to go back and keep at it; without a bookmark, I suspect it would get far
fewer visits and less thought.
Here’s another one: deep
into the umpteenth rewrite of a novel, it came to me that I needed to add a key
visual and emotional element to a character’s scenes in several places in the story.
When I did, I inserted bookmarks at each scene (Jake1, Jake2, Jake3, etc.). Later, I jumped easily from one spot to another to make sure I
had kept things consistent yet varied and had done all I needed to make the new
material blend with the old. Because my first drafts tend to be on the lean
side, bookmarking those additional bits of narrative enabled me to visit them
after they’d cooled a little to see if they needed more work.
Because you can give each
bookmark a different handle, another handy use is the ability to check back to important
passages. This is especially useful for continuity checks. Let’s say that early
in the novel you created a detailed description of a room, and the things in
that room are important to your story, and they come up again. Put a bookmark
there (“the-murder” or “crimescene” or some such) and it’s easy to refer back
and keep later references to that place accurate. This could be darned handy
for clues in a mystery novel.
How about bookmarking the
first page of each chapter to hop to one instantly? If you know you had Heather
shoot the green bunny in chapter 4 but can’t quite remember the sequence of
events when you’re referring to the shooting in chapter 16, it’s easy to check.
Marking
a passage for later use or change is another bookmark use. In one of my novels,
I planned to move the description I’d written for a character to an earlier
chapter during the rewrite. I bookmarked that passage so that, when I got to
the new description point in the rewrite, I could jump there, cut the
description from its page, then jump back to where I was (because I inserted a
“here” bookmark before I left that point) and paste it in. No hunting, no
searching for keyword strings, etc.
I’m sure you’ll find, or already have, many creative uses for bookmarks. In fact, if you have some, how about sharing them—or other computer tips—with me. I’ll pass ‘em on. Later, I plan to do some posts on using Search to upgrade the quality of your narrative.