But if you’re like me, you’ll constantly bounce back to fix stuff or make adjustments, and this is where this fellow is really handy. If you write your novel from start to end, then it’s no problem finding where you left off. Because it’s the biggest heading, it will never be nested under anything and you can use it to always find your place. So, remember that Marker Heading 1? That’s basically a bookmark. With this system, it’s easy to find That One Scene because of my descriptive Heading 3 that lets me find it easily. In that one I use Heading 1 for chapter numbers, Heading 2 for the point of view character and Heading 3 for the scenes within a chapter. You can see how nicely they nest under each other.

I’ve also been writing a fanfic in Google Docs, which also has this navigation system (called Outline). For the 316k monster I mentioned above, I have Heading 1 for the book titles, Heading 2 for settings, Heading 3 for key scenes in that setting. How you do this all depends on how you want to break down your novel. Now for each section of a story that I write, I will use headings so that I can easily find that part again. Whether it’s a character name, a piece of dialogue or what the hell happened in That One Scene, I do it at least three times in every writing session. Something that I know I vastly underestimated when I started writing was how much time I’d spend skipping back to check stuff. You want to start typing your novel above this. Then they show up in the Navigation Pane. You will find Heading 1 under Styles on the Home tab of the main menu. Both of these should be on their own lines and set to Heading 1. The first thing I type is Scrap Yard, the second is Marker. The headings is the important thing, as you will be able to navigate directly to each heading by clicking on it. The Navigation Pane allows you to view the document by headings, pages or by search results. Under “View” on the main menu, check “Navigation Pane”.

Here’s what I do, and hopefully it can help you too. I actually find Word really easy to use, and it’s all because a few years ago I figured out how to structure a document for a novel. Only because a few people I’ve chatted to seem to think that you need some fancy writing software to write anything of that length. I’m not saying that to impress anyone (it still needs to be edited down!). My trilogy is currently sitting at 316,078 words, which amounts to 732 Microsoft Word pages. It’s all in a single doc.

Microsoft word add in for writing books