How to Write a Novel in Google Docs

what's up my friend Abby here and welcome back to writer's life Wednesdays where we come together to help you make your story matter and make your author dreams come true today we are talking all about writing a novel using Google Docs I've had so many requests for a video on this topic and I haven't done it yet so I'm really excited to get into this video and show you guys how to use Google Docs in a very similar way that you would use scrivener so scrivener is my favorite writing software as you probably know but you can customize other softwares like Google docs to be organized and be aesthetic and be fully functional for brainstorming outlining and writing so that is what we're going to dive into in this video I'm going to show you how to make your Google Docs very organized basically replicating the whole interface that you have within scrivener where you have documents and notes and outlines and character profiles all organized within your binder we're going to kind of take that same model and we're going to replicate it in Google Docs and I'm going to show you how to do this and how to make it super aesthetic and fun so that you actually enjoy the experience of writing in this software so if you have been writing your novel in Google Docs and you just want to improve your whole experience this video is for you why does your story matter good question what if I told you that there's a science behind every great story I don't just teach you how to write I teach you how to change the world with your story and make your author dreams come true okay so we're going to cover a lot in this video first we're going to talk about manuscript organization how to keep your documents all in order and keep them organized for easy navigation I'm also going to show you how to make super aesthetic character profiles including character images for inspiration also going to show you how to make index card outlines that's a really fun feature in scrivener that I have not seen a lot of people utilize outside of scrivener so I want to show you how to utilize Google docs for this so all you need is a laptop and Google Docs let's get into it I'm going to be using scrivener as a model for what we want our Google Docs experience to be like first things first we're going to start with organization let's say you're starting with something that looks just like this you just have your manuscript maybe all in one document that goes on and on and has chapter breaks but nothing is really that organized and maybe you have notes in a separate Google doc but you can't quickly reference those notes and you don't have them organized in a functional way so we're going to first set up our manuscript document so that it is more organized because when we're working in scrivener we have the ability to have a manuscript folder and then see all the chapters inside the folder and this is one of my favorite um ways to write now I used to write in word docs that would just continue on and on as one ongoing document but I love scrivener's feature to go to different documents as separate files within a folder so how can we do this I'm not going to recommend that you make separate Google docs for each chapter because you won't be able to compile them all into one document when it comes time to share it with someone or print off the entire manuscript we're just going to stay within the one manuscript document but we're going to use the functionality within the outline of Google docs so that's right over here you have a little icon that looks like a hidden menu you want to click on that and you will see an area for out lines so the way outlines appear is through making a heading in your document actually a heading from the style list so you're going to just copy or highlight the name of your chapter or chapter heading and then click on the style list box and go to heading one so you can customize heading 1 to look however you want I'm going to customize it with a different font and maybe a highlight color so that it's more aesthetic and there's my heading if I want the same style for all my headings I'm going to highlight it right click and then go down to format options and then click update heading 1 to match and you'll notice now in the style menu that heading 1 now has that style you've probably also noticed that chapter 1 magically appeared over here in the outline section that's how we're going to navigate our document in a similar way that we would navigate scrivener so let's scroll down to chapter two highlight that and make it heading 1 style and now boom you see chapter two over here let's go to chapter three just so I can show you what I mean I'm also going to make a page break here so I'm going to click right above the chapter heading and then click insert and go down to break page break you can also use command enter if you're on Mac that will just bump this chapter down into the next page so it's planner more organized and then you're going to highlight The Heading again style it as heading 1 and now as you can see we have three chapters here in the outline and as I hover over them you see that they're links so when I click on chapter two it shoots me back up to chapter two same with chapter one so this becomes our navigation okay very similar to scrivener where we have navigation here it's going to be just as functional in Google Docs if you go through your manuscript and instead of having it be one long running document you insert first of all page breaks to make it look neat and tidy and then you insert the styled headings that style of heading one is going to be what puts it here in your outline for easy navigation so I'm just going to go through and do that to each chapter now [Music] as you can see it has put all these chapters as links in my outline so I can click on each one and navigate there easily okay so now that we have easy navigation set up for our manuscript document we're going to organize our manuscript and other notes in Google Drive similar to the layout of scrivener so here in my scrivener template we have the manuscript folder we have the outlines folder with subdocuments we have the characters folder with all of the characters that are included in the story and then we have templates I'm going to show you how to make templates with Google Docs that of the templates that I share we have a settings folder we have a research folder we have a notes folder for random notes so we're going to just recreate this entire setup in Google Drive so you're going to go to drive.google.com and just click on the new button over on the left hand side of the screen and click new folder if you don't already have a folder set up for your writings so we're just going to call this one novels and now we have a new folder so we're going to go into that folder and here's where we're going to start making folders upon folders so the first folder we want to make is the book project and for this example I'm using Pride and Prejudice so I'm just going to make that the name of my folder and you're going to just treat this like you would a scrivener project okay so in your novels folder in Google Drive you could put as many novel projects as you want but within this folder is where we're going to build out the scrivener-like interface okay so we're starting with the manuscript we already have the manuscript but we want to make sure it goes here and is centrally located with all our other notes so let's go back over to the manuscript and just move it there so we're going to go up to the move icon here so once you click on the Move icon you may have to backstep a few times just to get to your main drive and then from there you will see the folder you created called novels double click that and then you'll see the book project you just want to double click that it may say the folder is empty just click move here and then it will tell you that it has been successful we moved okay and then once we have that in the folder we can go back to that Tab and you should see it right here so the manuscript can just hang out there that's totally fine you can also change the way you view this folder by switching toggling between grid layout and the list layout the list layout looks a little bit more like scrivener so I'm going to leave it on that and next I want to make a folder for my outlines because that's the next folder in scrivener so I want my outlines with a space for the brain dump the 3x story structure long outline and subplots so let's do that now I'm going to right click anywhere on the screen and click new folder and just name this one outlines double click to go into outlines and then we're going to create a new document here and this is going to be the brain dump so for the brain dump I just remind myself that my notes do not have to make sense and they can be messy and that's the point of a brain dump it's just to get your ideas completely out of your head so going back to outlines we can now refresh the page and see that the brain dump is there you can toggle over to list view to see a little preview window of what's inside the document I'm going to go ahead and make another document here and that's going to be my three act story structure so I'm just going to go and copy and paste it from my skirviner document but you will find the template to the 3x story structure this entire thing here you'll find that below this video it is linked in the description of this video along with all of my other writing templates so I'm going to make a new document again for my long outline I don't have a long outline obviously for this example but if I did have a long outline it would include copying and pasting what I have of the 3x story structure and just enhancing each plot point so this this folder is looking pretty good I have one more to carry over and that is my my subplots and subplots are something that I've talked about on my channel before this particular method I use to outline subplots which you can see a quick example of here for Pride and Prejudice and you can check out that video on subplots it is linked in the description box below this video if you want to use this template and get the most out of that so I have all my outline documents how I need them here in the outlines folder let's navigate back to the book folder the book project and add another folder within the folder okay so we're basically just creating a bunch of folders within folders here the next one I want to do is characters so if anyone here uses scrivener you know that when you look at your characters folder you can assign photos to each document inside this folder and create these really super cool cool character cards and have character profiles inside them really cool functionality but we can do something just as cool if not more cool within Google Docs okay so what we're going to do here is use my character profile template which I have specially designed and customized for Google Docs so here is the example template I just started to fill it out with um Elizabeth Bennett's information if I was writing a character profile for her for this book and as you can see I have all the same information all the same questions that I have you ask yourself with the desire fear misbelief and the different questions about your character your character's goals their relationships and conflicts all formatted super pretty and aesthetic with a place for your character inspiration photo if you do something like that grabbing photos off Pinterest or maybe creating something through Ai and then also a section at the bottom of this template for just a little mini aesthetic board I guess and inspiration visual inspiration and a little sticky note for any extra character notes that you may come up with so this whole template I built for you guys to use you can use as many of them as you need to and duplicate them so that you can keep using this template so I'm going to show you how to do that right now you're not going to request for permission to edit okay that's what Google Docs is going to prompt you with they're going to be like do you want permission to edit this no you do not want to do that so what you're going to want to do is go up to file and then click make a copy I would recommend just writing character profile here in the name and then copying it over to the folder you want so in this case we're going to navigate to the novels folder and you can put it in your book project folder and then click make a copy and now this one lives in your folder in your Google Drive and you'll be able to to use it for however many characters you want now before you start editing this one I would recommend making another copy okay so go up to file and then say make a copy and then keep it in the same folder and then click make a copy and it's going to open in a new tab but what you really want to do is go back to your book folder refresh and then you will see let's go to the grid view so we can see better character profile and then the copy of the character profile so I would leave one just blank it will be blank it won't have any information for the character I just put this example so that you can see what it looks like but it will be a blank character profile template that you can then use and copy as many times as you need to for all your characters so we're going to start organizing the character profiles by first making another folder of course so let's make another folder and call it characters and we're going to put our character profiles in there so just drop them into that folder drag and drop and then we're going to go into characters and now we can start to have fun with this so go into your copy of character profile and here is where you can start editing these details and changing out and customizing some of these areas of the card so first thing I'm going to do is swap out this photo and to do that I can actually move aside a few elements of this page don't be afraid to drag and drop and move things customize it how you want it to look you may have to move aside the sticky note to access this picture but basically you're just going to click on the picture and then you're going to delete it and insert a different one so I already have a picture that I want to use for Mr Darcy's character profile so we're going to go ahead and change the name up there and then just clear out some of this information and when you're starting from scratch you won't have any of this information obviously so we're just going to start by replacing the sticky note where it belongs and then we're going to go up to insert image upload from computer so here is my image of Mr Darcy obviously way too big so I'm going to go ahead and resize that by dragging the corner and dragging it to be smaller and then we have a few options here you're going to want to click in front of text in order for this image to be free flow like moving it around freely on the page so we're going to just move it over here onto the sticky note and position it how we want as you fill in these answers for these questions you may find that your columns start to crawl down the page or move on to the next page but that's okay because even if you are typing and your text ends up on the next page it will stay within this little text box here it won't be all over the place and it will not mess up too much of the formatting but you can always go back to the aesthetic elements later like the pictures if they moved around and fix how they moved around such as this sticky note area obviously moved a little bit and when I start to put in some information and these boxes move down the page some of these elements will move as well but that's okay everything is drag and drop you can just literally click it drag it move it around and for these for this area where I have a little mini aesthetic board I just grab these images off of Pinterest and loaded them in the same way I loaded in the character photo so you can do the same process and just kind of stagger them like a collage maybe find a quote from one of your characters and have fun with the aesthetic element of this if you guys want access to this template blank so that you can use it however you want and use it as many times as you want the link to this character profile template for Google Docs will be in the description box below this video so we're making progress we have our two character profiles here for our two main characters and I would put in more character profiles here obviously and as you can see from a glance we get a look at the aesthetic of each character the concept images and a little preview of what each character profile contains so quite similar to scrivener not quite the same but very similar okay so let's move on to our next folder we're going to just go back to our book document and as you can see we have our manuscript our outlines our characters now we need our settings folder let's right click anywhere on the page and just create a new folder for settings and open up that folder and create a new document and for each document on settings you can kind of decide what you want to include about these settings if you have a lot to say about World building or about the aesthetic of a particular setting you could write up a document about it and insert images just like I showed you with the character profiles for myself I kind of just base settings off of Aesthetics so if you're like me and you're more of a visual plotter with settings you might just want to go off of an image and so that's what I'm going to do here we're going to go to settings and we're going to just upload a file instead of a document or a Google doc we're just going to upload the picture and that's going to just hang out here okay we can rename it if we have a particular name for this setting and honestly for me and the amount of World building I do in my very real life stories I wouldn't necessarily go beyond this for a setting but you can always feel free to make the images part of a document like I said and create sort of your own style within each setting profile next folder we have in scrivener is research so again very similar to these other folders we're just going to right click and create a new folder and call it research and this one's going to be a little bit more technical I guess in scrivener one of the research things I put in here was actually straight from a web page which is another function that scrivener has where you can actually link a web page straight into your scrivener and see everything on that web page right inside your scrivener Google Docs doesn't have exactly the same functionality but what I can do here instead of linking to a web page is I can actually just copy the content of the web page so I'm just going to go to the top of this article and start highlighting halfway down so that you can kind of get what I what I mean by this and we're going to go back to our Google doc and just simply paste it and if everything loads over properly you should have all the same text and all the same images so this is another way to just keep your research at your fingertips without having to link to every blog post every article that you are referencing okay so I'm just going to call this dining and Regency Era and I'm going to leave that in my research folder so there's our first document in the research folder and obviously if I was writing a period drama story I would probably fill up this whole folder with all sorts of research and references that I want to keep at my fingertips okay the very last folder I'm going to make here is the notes folder and that's basically just going to contain whatever notes I need for the duration of plotting writing editing revising my notes become very messy after a while but as you could see in my scrivener my notes area was basically a place for me to write down any Styles about the writing style notes about the theme random notes and things like the books rating the soundtracks that inspired me maybe the book blurb as I'm working on the blurb as I go anything that's just random and doesn't have a place anywhere else will end up in the notes folder so you can use that notes folder however or you personally need to okay the last thing I want to address here is the index card outline this is a feature of scrivener that you may be familiar with if you've ever used scrivener and basically it's the ability to see your manuscript in the format of index cards so kind of like a mini outline I guess like an index card like a three by five card outline if you actually wrote your outline short summaries of each chapter on sticky notes and laid them out on a table it might look something like this I get a lot of use out of this functionality and scrivener I love this view this ability to see your story from a broader perspective so let's look at a way to do this in Google Docs what we're actually going to do is create a new document using the index card outline template that I've made for you guys so here's what it looks like and basically what we have going on here is a pageless Google doc with a table that's really all this is and that's how we're going to use our index cards so they're not quite the same as the scrivener index cards but they're very similar and if you download this template which I'm going to give you the link for in the description box below this video If you go to that link you'll be able to make a copy of this template just like I showed you for the character profile so when you click on that and you open up this link do not request for access to edit it instead go up to file and then click make a copy so when you click make a copy again it will prompt you to make where do you want to put this copy of this template we're going to go ahead and place it in the right folder you're going to go to novels Pride and Prejudice or whatever your book is called and then click select and you can put it in a templates folder later if you want and then click make a copy now we'll open a new tab and and bring you to your copy and from here you can start editing this table like I said it is basically just a stylized table where you can write in each cell and if you need more cards than this as you go all you have to do is go over to the sidebar here where there's a plus sign it says insert one row below and you click that plus sign and it will create that extra Row for you so you can fill in each of these cards with the information about each of your chapters just summarizing what happens in that chapter and you can also customize the colors here and I didn't show you that on the character profile sorry but the way you customize the colors anywhere is you right click and you can click on table properties and on the bottom of the list here in table properties you'll see color you can open that up and choose a different cell background so you can choose different cell colors for each card or you can copy all of them and change all of them at once so whatever makes you happy whatever matches the aesthetic of your story and for these shapes up here that live behind the titles behind some of the headers the way that you change the colors and shapes there is just by double clicking on the shape and then selecting it and selecting The Fill color here so let's change this one to Yellow and we can change the shadow effect to a a lighter yellow and then click save and close and now you can see that it has changed the color of the shape behind those words and you can do the same thing with your character profile so going back to the characters folder let's say we want to change the colors for each character that could be fun if each character has a different aesthetic so again we're going to just double click the shape that we want to change the color click the shape once to highlight it select it and then click on fill color choose whatever color you want I like to use some contrasting colors for the the tape I guess is what what I'm trying to make that look like and then here on the header that's a shape behind those words we're going to select that change the color there um and then from here we can also change the color of the text that's another thing you might want to change um the Highlight behind some of these words you can customize that too so as you can see you can just kind of go down this page and start to customize different aspects of it enjoy the process enjoy the adventure of organizing your notes your outlines and making it you making it something that you feel really confident and happy working in your book folder and you might be surprised by how quickly this Google drive folder becomes like your safe space to hang out in as a writer and to feel really creative and like block out all the exterior distractions of the internet when you're inside of this drive folder I want you to feel like you're in your own little world where your book is real you're characters or your friends and you can just have fun creating different templates and notes and having fun with it so again you can grab the index card outline the link to that is in the description box below this video also the link to the character profile with all of the stylistic customizations all of that is available at the link underneath this video but hopefully that gives you a good springboard to start from a good understanding of how much you can customize your workspace in Google Drive I know a lot of writers who write with Google Docs and a lot of them just barely scratch the surface because they kind of begin and end their whole process right here in just one run on document but can be so much more fun than that and even the even the document itself of your manuscript can be way more easy to navigate just by adding these headers and linking them with the outline in the sidebar so yeah little things that make a huge difference but hopefully you got some value out of this tutorial and enjoyed the process of organizing your story project okay boom that's it that is how you organize your novel in Google Docs and Google Drive for a super organized and aesthetic writing experience I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you got a lot of value out of it and remember to grab the templates that I mentioned by clicking the links below this video also if you're looking to upgrade from Google docs to scrivener and you've been really wanting to get scrivener you can get a discount 20 off scrivener by using the link beneath this video and using the code Abby at the checkout I also have a whole master class on learning scrivener so if you're a little intimidated by the whole process of learning the software I've got you covered that Master Class is everything you need to know No Nonsense step-by-step how to use the best best functions of scrivener for the most productive writing experience so you can check that out as well the link for that is beneath this video too comment below and tell me what is your favorite writing software and why do you love it so much and what is the best feature about It smash that like button if you liked this video and be sure to subscribe to this channel if you haven't already because I post writing videos every Wednesday and I would love to have you here in the community also be sure to check out my patreon because that's where we go beyond videos and take storytelling to the next level the patreon community is not only the best way to support what I'm doing here on YouTube but it's also the only way to get exclusive content like access to the Discord community and monthly live training sessions all of that and more you can find at patreon.com Abby Emmons until next week my friend rock on finding small ways it doesn't have to be these big pivotal moments it can be asking yourself what is my character's desire what is Their Fear what is their misbelief and what are the little moments that in subtle ways I can draw that to the surface a lot of times with material that's already there we're not even talking about like oh let's rewrite the book and

Channel: Abbie Emmons

Views: 415,006

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Id: rCG6Gdj_fWE

Length: 30min 35sec (1835 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 12 2023