Organising Your Project

Your project is organised into a set of top level folders called “Root Folders”, which each have specific meaning in the project. Your project documents and notes are stored under these root folders. All the content of your project is available in the Project Content panel on the left side of the main window.

The Project Content tree populated with example documents.

Each line in the project tree shows the name of each item, its word count (or alternatively character count), an icon for Active and Inactive Documents, and a custom icon for Importance and Status of each item. These latter two are covered alter in this section.

You can add, view and edit documents in the project tree by right-clicking on them. Some features are also located in the buttons along the top, next to the Project Content label.

How Root Folders Work

Projects are structured into a set of top level folders called “Root Folders”. They are visible in the project tree at the left side of the main window. Each type of root folder has a distinct icon.

The documents that make up your story go into a root folder of type Novel. Your notes go into the other root folders. These other root folder types are separated into types depending on what kind of notes go into them. This is not only for organisation. It also matters to how you can reference these notes later. We will come back to this in the Tags and References section.

A new project may not have all of the root folders present, but you can add the ones you want from the project tree tool bar.

The intended usage of each type of root folder is listed below. However, aside from the Novel folder, no restrictions are applied by novelWriter on what you put in them. You can use them however you want.

Root Folder Types

Novel (Story)

This is where you put the documents that are part of your story. You can create multiple Novel folders if you wish, but various parts of the application assumes each Novel folder belong to one novel.

The Novel folder is somewhat special in that it can contain documents for chapters, scenes and story partitions. How this is indicated is covered in the section Chapters and Scenes.

Plot (Notes)

This is where you can keep notes and outlines of your story plots. Such notes can be particularly useful if you have outlines for sub plot. You can make references to these subplots from the scene documents, which makes it easier to track story progress.

Characters (Notes)

Character notes go in this root folder type. For your main characters, you may want to make one document for each character. For smaller characters you can put multiple into the same document. In your chapters and scenes you can reference these character notes as point-of-view or focus characters.

Locations (Notes)

The locations where your story takes place can be documented here. This, together with Plot and Characters are the key story elements to track, and to reference from your chapter and scene documents.

Timeline (Notes)

If the story has multiple plot timelines or jumps in time within the same plot, this folder type can be used to track this.

Objects (Notes)

Important objects in the story, for instance physical objects that change hands often, can be tracked here.

Entities (Notes)

Does your plot have many powerful organisations or companies? Or other entities that are part of the plot? They can be organised here.

Custom (Notes)

The custom root folder type can be used for tracking anything else not covered by the above options.

Templates

Any document added under this root folder will be made available as template options when creating new documents. See Document Templates for more details.

Archive

If you don’t want to delete a document, or put it in the Trash folder where it may be deleted, but still want it out of your main project, you can put it in this folder. The contents of the document will be ignored by the scanner that looks for tags, and it will be ignored in any outline view and in your manuscript.

Trash

This folder behaves like you expect. Anything dropped in here can be deleted permanently from the project, and the content doesn’t show up anywhere else in novelWriter.

The root folder types are closely tied to the tags and reference system. Each folder type for novel and notes corresponds to one or more categories of tags that can be used to reference the content in them. See Tags and References for more details.

Tip

The root folders have standard names, but you can rename them to whatever you want.

Regular Folders

You can add regular folders anywhere you want in the project. The folders are there purely as a way for you to organise the documents in meaningful sections and to be able to collapse and hide them in the project tree when you’re not working on those documents.

When novelWriter is processing the documents in a project, like for instance when you create a manuscript from it, these folders are ignored. Only the order of the documents themselves matter.

Documents

You can add documents anywhere you want in your project structure. You can even add documents as child items of other documents, just as if they were folders. This makes it easy to associate a set of scenes with their chapter. You can also do this in your notes, where you for instance may have a hierarchy of your locations.

The name on a document in the project tree is not linked to any headings in the document text. Think of the document name as a file name. You can rename a document, or any other item in the project, at any time.

Documents come in two types:

Novel Documents

These are the documents that make up your story or novel. They can only be added under a root folder of type Novel. You can technically also add them under Archive. See Chapters and Scenes for more details on how these documents are handled by novelWriter.

Project Notes

These are the documents where you keep your notes. You can add them anywhere in your project, including under Novel type folders. If you do add them there, they are not treated as a part of the story by default.

You can convert between the two types of documents where both types are allowed. You can also convert folders into documents, which may sometimes be convenient too.

Another convenient feature is that documents can be split into sub-documents by its headings, or multiple documents merged into one. This is particularly useful if you start out with larger structural documents, like one containing all chapters and scenes in an act, and then split those when you start writing. See Split and Merge Documents for more details.

Document Templates

If you wish to create template documents to be used when creating new documents, like for instance a character note template, you can add a Templates root folder to your project. Any document added to this root folder will show up in the Add Item menu in the project tree toolbar. When selected, a new document is created with its content copied from the chosen template.

New in version 2.3.

Active and Inactive Documents

A document can be set as “Active” or “Inactive”, which alters the icon in the third column of the project tree. These are mostly intended for your convenience as they will indicate whether the document is meant to be included in the manuscript or not. You can think of an inactive status as a whole-document out-take. It allows you to take it out without moving it to Archive.

Inactive documents are by default excluded from your manuscript, but you can override this if you wish. See Document Selection for more details.

Importance and Status

Each document or folder in your project can have either a “Status” or “Importance” label set. These are labels and icons that you control and define yourself, and novelWriter doesn’t use them for anything. You can modify these labels in Project Settings. See Status and Importance for more details.

The “Status” labels are intended to tag a novel document as for instance a draft or as completed, and the “Importance” labels are intended to tag character notes, or other project notes, as for instance a main, major, or minor character or story element.

Whether a document uses a “Status” or “Importance” label depends on which root folder it lives in. If it’s in a Novel type folder, it uses the “Status” label, otherwise it uses an “Importance” label.