Chapters and Scenes#

Since novelWriter uses a plain text format, the structure of your novel must follow a certain set of simple rules. For documents in a Novel type root folder, it is the heading that determines if the document is a chapter or a scene.

The formatting of headings is based on Markdown. A heading is indicated by a line starting with one or more # characters. It accepts up to four of these. You can use multiple headings in the same document, but it is the first heading that determines which icon and information is displayed in the project tree.

Note

You can use the same heading levels for your notes in the other root folders, but they aren’t treated as chapters or scenes, so there you are free to use them as you want.

Heading Levels#

Four levels of headings are understood for novel documents. You can pick and choose from these as you want, but if your story has chapters, you should use these headings to indicate them. If you also add scene headings, you have better control of how your scene separators are formatted in your manuscript. The chapter and scenes headings are also displayed in the Novel View and Outline View.

# Title Text: This is a heading level one. This heading indicates the start of a new partition. Partitions are for when you want to split your story into “Part 1”, “Part 2”, etc. You can also choose to use them for splitting the text up into acts, and then hide these headings in your manuscript so that they are not included in the output.
## Chapter Title: This is a heading level two. This heading indicates the start of a new chapter. Chapter numbers can be inserted automatically when building the manuscript, so you don’t have to do this in the title. See Automatic Numbering for more details.
### Scene Title: This is a heading level three. This heading indicates the start of a new scene. Scene numbers or scene separators can be inserted automatically when building the manuscript, so you can use the title field as a working title for your scenes if you wish, but you must provide a minimal title.
#### Section Title: This is a heading level four. This heading indicates the start of a new section. Section titles can be replaced by separators or ignored completely when building the manuscript. The meaning of a section is really whatever you want it to be. You can use it to split your scenes up into chunks, or into separate documents.

For headings level one through three, adding a ! modifies the meaning of the heading. The alternative meaning of the heading is only relevant when you generate your manuscript, but you may want to keep the use cases in mind while writing.

#! Title Text: This tells the Manuscript Build tool that the level one heading is intended to be used for the novel or notes folder’s main title, like for instance the novel title on the cover page. When building the manuscript, this will use a different styling of the title, which you can modify independently from how partition titles are styled. See The Title Page for more details.
##! Chapter Title: This tells the Manuscript Build tool to not assign a chapter number to this chapter title if automatic chapter numbers are enabled. Such titles are useful for prologues and epilogues for instance. See Unnumbered Chapters for more details.
###! Scene Title: This is an alternative scene heading that can be formatted differently in the Manuscript Build tool. It is intended for separating “soft” and “hard” scene breaks. Aside from this, it behaves identically to a regular scene heading. See Hard and Soft Scenes for more details.

The formatting of these headings can be customised quite extensively in the Manuscript Tool, which is covered in a separate part of the documentation.

Note

The space after the # or ! character is mandatory. The editor will change colour and font size when the heading is correctly formatted.

Page breaks can be automatically added before titles, partition, chapter and scene headings from the Manuscript Build tool when you build your project to a format that supports page breaks. If you want page breaks in other places, you have to specify them manually. See Vertical Space and Page Breaks for more details.