BBC Micro model B has 32k memory. An average book, like Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein*, has about 350,000 characters in it. So you'd need over 10 times the memory to load it in, plus the software to edit it.

If people wanted to use a BBC Micro era computer to write a novel, how did they go about doing it?

Would it be a case of maxing out the expandable memory? The wikipedia article for the BBC Micro suggests it could support quite a large number of expansions, presumably if they are 32kb you would need around 10 to load the entire novel plus the software.

Or did word processing software use say, a floppy disk as a way to store the novel and load portions of it into memory? It looks like disks could be around 200kb for the micro, so multiple disks might work (plus, you'd need to store the novel offline anyway).

Or perhaps there was some kind of clever compression that would let you get more out of the memory?