Using Google Drive to Write Novels

I really love Google Drive. I love being able to get on any device anywhere, pull up my latest work, and start writing. It isn’t perfect, but it beats just about everything else I’ve found for its feature set, ease of access, and cloud-based data storage. The longer I use it, though, the more I discover its limitations.

Yesterday, I hit my longest word count ever inside a single Google Document: 70,000 words. I’ve written longer books than that, but I had always used multiple POV characters and created a separate document for each, so my total word count in a single document has never climbed higher than about 40,000. So yesterday, I was a few hundred words over 70,000, actually, when I received the following error message:

You can imagine my brief moment of panic at the thought of losing my last who-knows-how-many-hours of writing time. So I copy-pasted the chapter I was working on into a new document and restarted my browser. Same message, but only on that one really long document. All my other docs and spreadsheets were working fine.

I tried restarting my computer. No dice.

However, when I copy-pasted the entire book into a brand-new document, that error message stopped showing up. I have two theories on why this happened. The first is that the document got ‘corrupted’ somehow. I’m not sure how probable that is, though. The more likely theory is that the document hit some file-size threshold and stopped being able to handle its own size. All those revisions in the history do add up over time, I’m sure – especially when you’re talking 50k, 60k, 70k words being tracked at a time. The downside of pasting the whole book into a new document is that I’ve lost all those past revisions. In this case, I’m holding onto the old document just in case. That’s a small price to pay, given the alternative. Maybe its naive to trust Google not to one day chuck all my unfinished stuff into the void (I keep duplicate copies of my finished works on my personal PC, Drive, and, of course, at the online booksellers where they’re sold), but I’d have to say I trust Google’s cloud more than I trust some dust-caked hard drive in my home office not to fail.

Anyway, my point is that no matter which software you use to write, offloading to a different storage medium is worth the hassle.

While I’m at it, I’ll offer a shameless plug (it’s my blog, I’m allowed) and let you know that when I finish the book I’ve been talking about in this post, I’ll be offering it FOR FREE to members of my mailing list – and long before its release date, too! If you want to get in on that action, sign up using the form over on the sidebar. I rarely send out newsletters, but when I do, there’s typically something in it for you (usually a free something). As always, thanks for reading!