Nine posts ago this series started with a blank page. But most writers don’t arrive anywhere with a blank page — they arrive with a book. Eighty thousand words in a Word file, or three years of a Scrivener binder, or a screenplay in Fountain. The real first question isn’t “how do I start”; it’s “can I bring what I have?”
Yes — and if that’s you, this post works as an alternate beginning to the whole series. Import first, then read the rest with your own book on the screen instead of an example.
What you can bring in
Word documents (.docx), Scrivener projects (a .scriv folder, or a zip of one), and Fountain screenplays (.fountain, .spmd, or plain .txt). A Charc Backup (.charc) — the insurance file from post six — restores here too, though that’s a restore of a whole project rather than an import into a new one.
Importing sits right on the New Project screen, beside starting blank. It’s a first step, not a buried menu item.
How your file becomes chapters and scenes
A manuscript is one long river of text; a Charc project is acts, chapters, and scenes. The import’s whole job is deciding where the breaks go — and the important part is that it shows you before it commits.
Chapters can be found by heading styles, by lines that read like “Chapter 7”, by page breaks, or not split at all. Scenes can split on separators like * * *, on blank lines, or stay whole. Auto-detect works out which convention your document actually uses and picks the rule for you.
The result appears as a preview: your outline-to-be on one side, the text it produces on the other. If the guess is wrong, change the rule and the preview rebuilds. Nothing is imported until you accept it — the split is a proposal, not a verdict.
What survives the trip
Bold, italic, and underline. Paragraph structure. Chapter and scene titles, where they can be identified. From Scrivener, meaningfully more: the binder structure becomes your outline, and synopses and notes come across as outline synopses and entity pages — the work you did organizing is work you keep.
Two Word-specific rules worth knowing before you export from the old tool: tracked changes are resolved the way you’d hope — insertions kept, deletions dropped — and comments don’t come across. If the margins of your file hold anything you can’t lose, deal with it in Word first.
After the import
You land in a real project — the same kind this series has been building all along. An outline you can reorder, scenes you can write in, entity tabs waiting for your characters. Nothing about the import is permanent: if the split went wrong in one spot, drag the scenes into place rather than importing again.
One last habit, straight from post seven: the formatting that came with your file is your draft’s, not your book’s. Set the design in Project settings — pick a format — and let the manuscript you carried in start looking like the book it’s becoming.
Details and edge cases live in the Importing your work reference. And that closes the loop: whether you started from a blank page in post one or from eighty thousand words right here, you’re in the same place now — a working project, with the whole workspace ahead of you.