Formatting Your Word Manuscript for Clean Import into Deckle

A few minutes spent on heading styles before you import a Word manuscript into Deckle is the difference between chapters splitting automatically and one long unstructured document.

What You'll Need

• Your manuscript as a .docx file.
• A few minutes to check (or apply) paragraph styles in Word before importing.

Step-by-Step: Preparing Your Word Doc

1. Use a real Heading 1 style for every chapter title. Deckle splits chapters on Heading 1-equivalent styles. The name matching is flexible ("Heading 1," "Title," and "Chapter Title" all work, regardless of spacing or capitalization), but the paragraph does need to actually be styled as a heading, not just bold, large text.
2. Use Heading 2-equivalent styles for Parts, if your manuscript is divided into parts above the chapter level.
3. Style special content with matching paragraph styles, not just manual formatting: name a style "Verse" or "Poetry" for poetry, "Blockquote" or "Epigraph" for quoted material, "Written Note" for in-story letters/documents, "Conversation" for text-message-style exchanges, and "Inset" for general set-apart text.
4. Add per-chapter synopses or notes with the [Synopsis]/[Note] tags, if you already keep them in your outline. Start a paragraph with [Synopsis] or [Note] followed by your text, and it imports directly into that chapter's Synopsis or Notes field instead of the body.
5. Mark scene breaks as a paragraph containing exactly *** or * * *. Deckle imports this as a real scene break, not literal asterisk text.
6. Import: Binder → + → Import… → Word (.docx).

Common Mistakes

• Using bold, large text instead of an actual heading style for chapter titles. Deckle looks at the paragraph's style, not its visual appearance. Text that merely looks like a heading won't trigger a chapter split.
• Expecting an unrecognized style name to be dropped. It isn't. Content in a style Deckle doesn't recognize just imports as a normal paragraph, so nothing is lost, it just won't get the special formatting automatically.
• Not checking what lands before your first chapter heading. Anything before your first Heading 1 becomes a chapter titled "Prologue," intentional, but worth knowing if your document opens with front matter you didn't mean to have title itself that way.