So last night, Microsoft Word decided to screw with me. It wouldn’t let me save, close, or recover my file.
My book file. The book that’s due next week.
This has never happened to me before. Not in seven books, not in countless partials, critiqued chapters, synopses, edit letters, cut files, brainstorming notes, newspaper articles, school papers, or two senior theses (the second one filled with monstrous graphs and pictures), or even journal articles I used to copyedit at my old job. It didn’t happen on a Windows-based PC, and it didn’t happen on any of the three Macs I’ve written books on.
Other writers I know hate Microsoft Word with a passion, and have been encouraging me to switch to different software. I’ve downloaded Scrivener twice to try the trial software, but the learning curve seems a little steep to me. I don’t have time! I have books to write! The second time, I even did the tutorial, and it sounded grand! But then I got all confused because they asked me what kind of project I was doing (I think I clicked “novel”, and then proceeded to force me into this funky formatting that I didn’t like at all.
And it won’t show me page breaks. Justine says I need to get over my fascination with page breaks, but I can’t help it. I know it doesn’t correlate to the finished book at all, but it’s a quick and dirty way for me to keep my eye on the rhythm and pacing of any given chapter.
(Edited to add: Someone just informed me that they start each chapter on a new page in their document by making hard carriage returns (i.e., pressing “Enter/Return” key) until they hit the new page, and they find it annoying to go back and fix every chapter head every time they make an edit. Don’t do this. You’re right, it’s extremely annoying! Instead, when you reach the end of a chapter, click on “Insert” menu at the top of the screen, then “Break” then “Page Break” and it will automatically make a your cursor move to the top of the next page, wherever it may fall on the current one.
Next, someone will be telling me they type in their headers by hand.)
Also, like others, I love the comments feature. And track changes. Can you do that with Scrivener? Even if I switched, I’d still need to use Word when exchanging work with my CP.
I like the idea of Scrivener, though, and I’ll be trying it again with my next project, when I have a little more time to learn the software.
Anyway, back to my file situation. I Ctrl-A and copied the whole thing into my NeoOffice (OpenOffice for Mac), then tried to quit Word, eventually had to Force quit, and then one hard restart later, here I am with an Auto-Recovered file of my book from a few hours (and pages) before, and then the Neo Office version, which is ugly as sin, but at least intact.
Now the real question is, do I finish writing this book in Neo Office, which looks SO BIZARRE to me, or do I risk trying to use Word again?
Why are you doing this to me, Word?
March 14th, 2008 at 9:53 am
That’s scary! Especially the moment of panic of whether or not the file is corrupted and/or gone for good. Yikes! I have to say (knock on wood) that this has never happened to me with Word. I’ve always been a big fan of Word, at least using it on a Mac (which is the only computer I ever use). Sorry to hear about your troubles. Why do those things always seem to happen when time is of the essence?
Christina
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March 14th, 2008 at 10:14 am
OpenOffice, Word… nothing beats Notepad.
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March 14th, 2008 at 10:31 am
I would reinstall Word first and then try it again. First, email the entire damn thing to yourself and your cp as an attachment. Good luck!
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March 14th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Christina, that’s what I always said too when Justine complains to me. “Well, it never happened to ME.”
Bro, the day you write a novel on Notepad…
Wendy, did I mention the book is due Monday? There will be no futzing around with reinstalling ANYTHING for the next few days.
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March 14th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Yikes! that sounds horrific. Best of luck with finishing up and I’m knocking on wood for you that nothing else goes wrong.
I’m also obsessed by the lovely page-break, so here’s my contribution: if you’re in a hurry and don’t want to deal with the mouse, you can insert a page break by hitting Ctrl-Enter (or I assume Applekey-enter on a mac) on the keyboard. Mmm, page breaks.
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March 14th, 2008 at 10:45 am
You might run a disk repair too, just to see if there’s something wacky going on at a deeper level. (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.)
I had that happen once but it was because I was out of room on the HD and MSWord thought it needed more room than it actually did to save the file (it is a RAM hog and might have been caching RAM on the HD?). So, I saved to an external drive and that worked.
BTW–Scrivener is most effective when you *start* with it, because you can set up your structure from scratch. I have each chapter as a clickable file on the left sideboard. Yes, you can insert comments (annotations). There’s a notes area on the right where I put my sketchy ideas, and pictures, and URLs, and whatever I want, plus a little synopsis card that I use instead of a plotting board. It has taken me a while to figure out how to best use it. The best part now is that I don’t have a bajillion little scraps of paper with all my important notes on them (that I lose).
Good luck DP. Don’t let the Evil ‘Puter Monsters steal your book!
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March 14th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Seriously – I worked on a project in college (not TOO long ago – 2002) with a guy (young. NOt more than 23) that DIDNT USE WORD WRAP.
He preferred to hit “enter” than to let his text wrap around.
Just thinking about that right now, makes my stomach churn.
Good luck with your deadline!
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March 14th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Oooh, that’s one of my worst fears. That’s why I have 3 Flash drives and I e-mail myself a draft every couple of chapters. I hope you get it worked out!
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March 14th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
About inserting page breaks — there’s actually an even easier way to do it in Word — just hit Ctrl-Enter!
(not absolutely sure how this works on a Mac though)
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March 14th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Not for nothing is Microsoft known as the Evil Empire!
On my older Macs I use a program called WriteNow, which was once the leanest and most intuitive word processor known to man. They stopped updating it ten years ago, and it only works up through OS 9. I have to “save as” and convert to MS Word every time I want to print something out at the library.
Now I am finally making the transition to OS X (Leopard) with my new MacBook. Rather than buy yet another clunky version of MS Word for Mac, I got “iWork” from Apple, which is similar to MS Office with a numbers thingie, a power-point-type thingie (which everyone says is easier to use than PP), and of course a word processor. The latter can both import and export files in Word format, but in the meantime you get to stay with Apple techhology during the important phase (the creative one). It costs $60-70 for the suite.
I’m not familiar enough yet with iWork to make a recommendation, but thought I’d put the idea into the hopper.
Meanwhile, it sounds like you jury-rigged a work-around – big whew! of relief!
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March 14th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Make sure that you have Word set to Auto-Save every 5 minutes. Unless your computer is ancient, you’ll never notice it. Of course, this means you can’t lose more than 5 minutes of work.
(Microsoft doesn’t turn this on by default because back in 1995 it put to much of a performance hit on PCs …)
1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. Click the Save tab.
3. Select the Save AutoRecover info every check box.
4. Type “5″ in the minutes box.
5. Click OK.
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March 14th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Not using style sheets makes baby Jesus cry …
Don’t insert page breaks. Presumably you have chapter titles, or at least chapter numbers. If you’re formatting those by hand, making them bold and changing the font size and such, well, remember about the tears.
Instead, you should have a style set up for the chapter titles. That style should automatically insert a page break (or a section break with a page break) before the text. You can use the Heading 1 style for this; just change the formats and so on to match the look of the rest of your document.
If you don’t like using the Style pull-down in the toolbars, you can have key combinations assigned to styles. By default, CTRL+ALT+1 makes a paragraph a Heading 1 (you can apply it before, during, or after typing the chapter title). If you press ENTER at the end of typing the chapter title, the next paragraph is in the Normal style (you can set Heading 1 to be followed by any style that you want: Heading 1, Body Text, Bulleted List, whatever).
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March 14th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Not using style sheets may make baby Jesus cry, but using them makes my typesetter WEEP.
Page breaks are plenty enough for me.
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March 14th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
what is a minior freak?
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March 14th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
I’ve never used the comments function in Microsoft Word, but Scrivener has a couple different ways of tracking information within a document.
When you open the Inspector, go down to the “General” bar. You can label each chapter (by narrator in a multiple-POV, etc.) and identify the status (first draft, modified draft, incomplete, etc.). Both of these are customizable, so you can tailor them to fit your needs.
For keywords, click on the key icon at the bottom of the Inspector, then the plus sign in the “Keyword” bar. This allows you to add keywords to chapters (such as different plot threads, characters, etc.) and search for them.
You can also use the notepad icon in the bottom of Inspector to make notes on the section (i.e. revisions, fact-checking, etc.).
The ability to play with the storyboard within Scrivener is really cool, and I love the “autosave after two seconds of inactivity” setting.
Good luck with the word processing woes!
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March 14th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Anonymous, they are the ones who work for those cut-rate circuses.
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March 14th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Barratt, I’m trying to picture how that would work from a critique perspective…. most of my CPs dont’ use Scrivener. Would they have to set up their own documents just to critique a chapter?
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