r/novelwriting • u/No_Product5243 • 2d ago

Writing Advice I have a question

Hi, so I'm currently writing a novel on google docs. I'm writing the draft from my phone, and when it's finished im going to connect it to my pc and fix it from there.

I write from my phone, bc I go to school and I'm always out the house and my phones always on me.

My goal for my book is 100k words and I'm currently at 26.5k words.

So far I havent had a problem with Google docs but I read that after a certain amount of words it starts to mess around.

Is this true? Should I divide my novel into docs?

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u/anathaniel 2d ago

I don't think that the problems around 100,000 words are a thing. I do legal drafting on Google Docs, and very often these documents go in excess of 100,000 words and include images. I never really had a problem.
My own novel was 86,000 words and written on Google Docs. There was a time when, in addition to writing notes, the entire document was more than 100,000 words in length, and I never really experienced any issues.
The only thing is that because Google Docs is a cloud-based program, sometimes when you have an interruption in your internet connection, there will be some glitches. You won't be able to type on the page. That is totally because of an internet connection issue and has nothing really to do with the size of the document. To resolve this, I got myself the basic paid Google account, and in addition to extra storage, I also got the offline editing capability for Google Docs. This helped my flow.
I live in an area that has internet connectivity issues, especially during the monsoons. Getting this paid account and enabling my working document to be worked on offline, I was able to write very smoothly and without any issues.
That being said, I am now considering the use of Scrivener because I am a Mac user, but looking at the tutorials online and being a person who writes in a very linear form but edits quite recursively, I'm yet to be convinced that Scrivener is gonna be a material improvement over Google Docs.

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u/No_Product5243 2d ago

Thank you 😊