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Let's assume you have a work in progress: One file containing your unfinished novel, and another file containing an outline and chapter notes. How do you transfer this into yWriter? There is one thing you can do beforehand which will make life a lot easier. In your novel, ensure that all scenes are broken with three asterisks, spaced like so: * * * If you're using one asterisk you can use search-replace in your word processor to change it to three. The reason for doing this will be explained below. First, start a new yWriter project. You can use the wizard, or you can do it manually. Once you've saved the blank project, create 20 or so new chapters. (Click Chapter, then Create several chapters, then enter the number and click OK) It should end up looking like this: Now click the first chapter in the list on the left hand side of the screen. The right-hand list will show you the scenes in that chapter (just one, at the moment.) Double-click scene 1 in the right-hand list to open the editor window. It should look like this: Now paste your outline for chapter 1, scene 1 into the box in the bottom right corner of the edit window. (Assuming you have one - it's not required.) After you've done that, paste the text for chapter one into the big box. If there's a viewpoint character, you can enter this on the form, and also give the scene a really short description. If you have more than one scene in this chapter, and they're separated with the '* * *' marker, you can now click the 'Split scene on * * *' option in the Scenes dropdown menu. If you have multiple scenes but they're not separated with '* * *' you'll have to do it manually: (1) Highlight everything after the end of the first scene and choose 'Edit - Cut' then click 'Scenes' then 'Add Scene' to add a second scene to the chapter. Choose 'Edit - Paste' and repeat from stage (1) until you've added a separate scene for each chunk in this chapter. Now you can see why I recommended splitting scenes with '* * *' first. When the chapter is done, click the 'Save and Next' button. You'll now be looking at Chapter 2, Scene 1, and you can repeat exactly what you did above. Once you've transferred your scenes and outline notes into yWriter you'll be able to start creating blank scenes and fleshing them out with detail.