Word: How to link all of the dialogue of a novel (in a Word doc) with other documents?

Question

This is what I'm trying to figure out:

I have a Word doc containing a novel I'm writing. I'd like to move all of the dialogue for Character A into CharacterA.docx and move all of the dialogue for Character B into CharacterB.docx, etc., for every character.

And then when I change the dialogue in the individual character documents, I'd like it to update in the main novel Word doc.

So, the characters' dialogue could be viewed individually (to make sure they have distinctive voices and so forth) and changed, edited, etc, and these changes would update in the main novel document.

Is this even possible?

Answer 1

The only mechanism I know in Word for including other documents is that of the Master Document.

The master document is a Word file that contains links to a set of other, separate Word files, called subdocuments. The master document only contains links to the subdocuments, whose contents are not physically inserted into the master document. This allows editing the subdocuments separately, where changes to subdocuments are incorporated automatically into the master document.

This mechanism would be extremely cumbersome to use in your case.

You would need a separate document per each dialog part, then have one master document for each character, as well as a total master document for the novel itself. This could run into thousands of Word files, where each is inserted twice: Once into the novel document and once into the character's document.

I also don't know anything about performance here, in the sense of how much time will be needed for Word to open a master document with thousands of subdocuments. A fast computer and an SSD disk would probably be very useful here, but satisfactory performance is not guaranteed.