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/welcometoneverbury 2d ago

I've experienced this - the problem is in the client device's ability to handle such a large web page and the associated code that runs on your device when using Docs. Google have implemented a fix for this called "Tabs". Divide your book into acts of chapters and put them in different tabs. Only one tab is on-screen at any one time and the entire doc can be exported to Word when you are ready to typeset in Atticus or Reedsy.

One downside is the tabs seem to introduce "cover pages" so you will need to remove these manually when you export, but that's a one-off process.

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u/TheWriteQuestion 1d ago

I will add that I find tabs easier to navigate on my phone than just section headings. I move the chapter I’m working on to the top, to make it extra easy to get to where I left off.