I have trouble finishing

[gunhilltrain]

I do a lot of that. My working document is like a patchwork of bullet points, headings, text fragments, sentences, etc.

Increasingly I use colours to distinguish not for publication items or things that need work from finished text so that they are easier to spot.

That's pretty impressive; I don't get nearly as complicated as that. Although I'll consider using some of your ideas.

 

[StillStunned]

Only 23? I suppose you mean that it's now only twelve hours per day rather than twenty-four. Or did you meet that special lady at age 23?

That's more or less when real life caught up and I had to spend my energy on other things.

 

[gunhilltrain]

That's more or less when real life caught up and I had to spend my energy on other things.

Everybody's life changes when they graduate high school or college. (Graduate school for some.) None of my grandparents graduated high school. They basically went to work around the age of sixteen. (That would have been around 1920.)

 

[Writer61]

That's pretty impressive; I don't get nearly as complicated as that. Although I'll consider using some of your ideas.

I am experimenting with using defined styles in Word which can be quickly applied then, with a Table of Contents, you can quickly generate a list of places where your attention is required and jump directly to each of them.

The TOC will come out before publication of course.

Currently I have:

• Heading 1 for chapter titles/other structural items which will stay in for publication
• Heading 2 for items that help me structure the story (e.g. the day, the scene) that will come out
• Heading 3 for comments, text I'm not happy with, etc. then restore to "Normal" style when I am

I am using bold, red for #2 and regular, dark orange for #3 but you could use different typeface, colours, etc. to suit you.

I normally upload the Word document but I haven't submitted anything prepared like this before. May cut & paste into a new document to minimse risk.