Basic concepts

The Book hierarchy

Parts

A novel is expected to be divided into chapters and sections. Parts are optional; technically they are first level chapters. However, in the mdnovel project tree they are on the same level as the chapters, but they produce a heading one level above. Thus, parts are mainly for inserting first level headings between the chapters, if needed.

Hint

You can convert chapters into parts and vice versa by simply changing the level.

Chapters

A mdnovel project must at least have one chapter. In the exported documents, regular chapters have a second level heading.

For mdnovel, the chapters only serve as containers for sections to which the actual dramaturgical function is assigned. This is why there are only a few chapter properties to be set.

Sections

All body text of a novel in mdnovel belongs to sections. Sections can be scenes, pieces of exposition, descriptions, narrative summaries—it is entirely up to you how you divide your text into sections. There is a variety of metadata for sections for your free use.

In the text body of the exported documents, sections are separated by section dividers by default, like so:

* * *

However, if you need more fragmented sections when plotting and organizing than the reader should see later, you can also append sections to each other as new paragraphs with no section divider inbetween.

Part/chapter/section types

Each part, chapter, and section is of a type that can be changed via context menu or Part/Chapter/Section menu. The type can be Normal or Unused.

Normal

“Normal” type parts, chapters, and sections are counted. The totals are displayed in the status bar.
“Normal” type sections are exported to the manuscript and included in the word count.
“Normal” type parts and chapters can have subelements of each type.
“Normal” type tree elements are color coded according to the coloring mode settings.

Unused

You can mark parts, chapters, and sections as unused to exclude them from word count totals and export.

The subelements of unused parts and chapters are unused as well.
If you mark a section “Unused”, its properties are preserved.
Unused tree elements are displayed in gray.

Section completion status

You can assign a status to each “Normal” type section via context menu or Section menu. You can choose between Outline, Draft, 1st Edit, 2nd Edit, and Done.

You can choose a coloring mode to display sections in different colors depending on their completion status.
Optionally, you can declare one of the status to be the current work phase, and choose a coloring mode that highlights sections that are behind schedule.
Newly created sections are set to “Outline” by default.
Word counts by status appear in the Book properties.

Characters and story world

You can define characters, locations, and items, and you can relate them to sections to keep track of their place in the story. There is also some metadata stored with mdnovel, mainly as a quick reference that might come in handy when writing or editing.

Note

mdnovel is not meant as a tool for extensive world building. For this, there is a plethora of dedicated applications, online and offline wikis, and notetaking software. However, mdnovel offers the option of linking images and files with the characters, locations, and items to facilitate access if your external application allows this.

Important

If you want to assign viewpoint characters to your sections, you first have to create the characters that come into question.

Formatting text

Section content is expected to be formatted using Markdown. When exporting Markdown documents, mdnovel would not re-format the text, so you can write in any Markdown dialect you want. The section editor provides some menu entries and keyboard shortcuts that insert Common mark style markup.

Important

Some character sequences are reserved for the mdnov file format, so they must not be used in your text.

Reserved strings:

@@ (used as element marker)
%% (used as property marker)
--- (horizontal ruler of any length used as delimiter for YAML-encoded areas)

Global find and replace

Currently, the section editor has no find/replace function. However, you can close mdnovel and open the .mdnov project file, which is actually nothing more than a Markdown file, with any text editor. This allows you to execute global find/replace operations. Just be sure not to touch the YAML-encoded areas and the lines containing the reserved strings shown in the box above.