Category: organizing drafts

Order!

Happy New Year! Here’s hoping for a less challenging, all around easier 2022!

On December 6, 2020, ryne39720 wrote, Any thoughts on organizing stories? As I write, I find myself asking questions, making lists, adding comments, elaborations, and parenthetical remark upon parenthetical remark. I usually just switch fonts, add a space or two and write all this extra junk in with my WIP, but this makes it difficult if I want to find a specific piece of junk later. Many of my notes are scattered on different electronic devices and at least three notebooks. I’m also writing a lot of scenes out of order. On top of all that, I’ve got a bunch of post-it notes and drawings and maps. I need a new system! How do you stay organized while writing?

SluggishWriter wrote back, I try to keep my notes confined to a few places – I make notes on the document with my story, on one note-taking app, and one notebook. This helps keep it streamlined while still letting me make notes wherever I want. Sometimes I need to scribble down something quickly, so I’ll do it on a bit of paper and leave it inside the notebook. I also use post-its occasionally and I like to stick them inside the back cover of the notebook.

It can kind of be a mess sometimes, but having it all in one place usually makes things better! I also like having a note app that has a search function, so you can quickly title it something related to the book and find it again later.

As far as the actual notes inside the notebook go, I use a two-page spread and just jot things down wherever I want on the page, sometimes having to draw lines to separate different topics, or bubble a specific idea I want to remember. The chaos lets me be freer about writing down notes.

Both of you get many points for the kind of looseness that lets creativity rip!

Everyone works differently, and if your method works, don’t change anything. Here’s what I do:

Almost everything is on my laptop, and each book has a separate folder. I sometimes use a pad and actual pen for tiny things, like jotting down synonyms from my online thesaurus. Once in a blue moon, an idea arrives as I’m climbing into bed. These I write down by hand because opening my laptop with its blue light is a great way to stay awake for hours.

Just saying, I do not like writing with a pencil. When I’m writing by hand, I stick with a nylon-tip pen with blue or black ink, but online, I occasionally use the highlighter. Once or twice I’ve hand-drawn a map of my kingdom or a diagram of the inside of a building; these are simple and in no way art.

I write my books mostly chronologically. Often at the beginning, though, I need to go back to add bits that the reader needs to know, sometimes an entire scene or two. When I recognize that need, I put the scenes in. Or sometimes I don’t see the need until I’m revising my first or nth draft.

If a scene pops into my mind that I’m going to want later, which occurs rarely but does happen, I’ll write as much of it as comes to mind and some notes about the rest of it at the end of what I have in my story so far, after hitting return a few times or after a hard page. Same with my ending if ideas for that come along. (I almost always know my ending before I start to write but not how it will come about. If I have an idea for that, I don’t want it to slip away.)

But if I’ve added material at the end of my ongoing story that doesn’t come until later, I mark the end of the chronological part with xxx so I can find my place.

If I change direction significantly, I rename my story by increasing the version number at the end of the name of my document. For instance, the first version of my book about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, A Ceiling Made of Eggshells, was called Alhambra 1. The next version, obviously, was Alhambra 2. (Alhambra was the city where the Spanish monarchs wrote the expulsion decree.)

My notes on my story are in a document called ideas in the book’s folder, and they generally keep pace with where I am in my story. In there, I write lists, wonder about what should happen next, what this character or that will say, what the setting looks and sounds and smells like. Sometimes I copy in bits of online research I’ve done, like snippets from Wikipedia. If a sentence or a paragraph doesn’t please me and I start to tense up, I copy it into ideas and work on it there. And I complain in there: I’m sleepy, who will want to read this—the doubts that I entertain as little as possible.

I keep a chronology of my story as I write it in its own document, called chronology. If I’m on top of my game, I also keep a running synopsis of each chapter, called synopsis, but I’m rarely that organized.

I’m a compulsive reviser even when I’m writing my first draft—this is not a productive quality. Don’t be like me if you don’t have to be. Inevitably I delete bits. Anything deleted that’s longer than a phrase gets copied into my document called extras, in case I change my mind and need it again.

Because I don’t remember, I keep an alphabetical list of my character names, called names.

Absolutely essential is my document, times, of my daily start and many stops and restarts. I never look backward in this to see how often I made my daily goal and how often I didn’t. That way lies madness!

Depending on the book, I may have other documents. For Ceiling, for instance, I had a document called glossary that listed the unfamiliar terms I learned in my research that I was likely to forget (like cortes, the parliament of the time, which was in no way democratic). I must have been lost in a title wilderness for The Lost Kingdom of Bamarre because I have several versions of a document called titles. Also in Lost Kingdom is a document called questions for RB (my editor).

So that’s my method. Here are three prompts:

  • Make a board game of your method of writing a story.
  • Your MC, Daedalus, who designed the labyrinth for King Midas has been trapped in it himself. He has his architectural plans in his belt, but his handwriting is so bad and his notes so scattered, he will need hours to determine which way to go to get out, but he doesn’t have hours—the Minotaur is on his way, and he’s murderously angry, as usual. Write what happens.
  • Your MC is a cultural anthropologist at a dig in north Africa, where bone fragments from several skeletons and part of a single skull have been found. The bones come from a previously unknown hominin species. The skull is damaged, suggesting its owner was killed by being clobbered. The thighbone of someone else shows a puncture. Bones from a single hand have arthritic changes that suggest repetitively holding something narrow, which may have been an arrow or a spoon. Or a pen??? Also found are bits of pottery from long before pottery is believed to have been invented. Your MC puts the clues together and writes a novel. Your job: write her story and, within it, her novel.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Save Me

In a comment after my last post I was asked how I organize my work to keep from losing drafts as I go along. This is how I do it. There are probably a hundred other ways.

This is an important topic. Your storytelling is you. The way you tell and revise a story is as much you as the way you chew your food or walk or laugh, and your storytelling can last; the rest is fleeting.

I write exclusively on the computer, so I have no longhand drafts. When I begin a new project, I name a folder for it based on what I think the book is going to be about. For example, I just finished a book in the Disney Fairies series. The folder is called Mother Dove, although the story turned out not to be about her. I should rename it, but I haven’t and probably never will, which will mean that a few years from now, I’ll waste time hunting for it. So if you name your folder and the name stops applying, change it. Don’t be like me.

Before I write a book, I write notes. I keep a separate file (or document) of notes for each book. Be like me that way. Don’t let your notes for one book run into your notes for another. The notes file goes in the folder for the book. I’ve posted about my notes, so I’ll say here only that sometimes I copy a few sentences or a paragraph that I’m not happy with from my manuscript itself into my notes. Then I copy that section over and over, improving as I go. When I’m satisfied, I copy the revised version into my manuscript and overwrite the original, which is gone from my manuscript but preserved in my notes. Even better, the evolution is preserved, step by step. This will simplify the work of my and your future biographers. And it’s gratifying to have a record of what I went through.

When I start the manuscript itself, it becomes a file in the folder too. I name it and follow the name with a version number, obviously 1 initially. (The file name has nothing to do with the book’s title.) Whenever I change the direction of the story, I save the old version with its old version number and then save it again with a subsequent number. I wouldn’t have to do this if I were just going to keep writing forward, but I’m probably going to go back and revise some of what I’ve already written to support the new direction. If I don’t save the old version, I’ll lose it, and what if my new path turns out to be a dead end? When I make a really radical departure, like shifting POV, I rename the file entirely and number it 1 again, although I keep it in the same folder. The reason for the new name is for me to be able to spot where I took such a different tack.

The result is that I have many truncated versions of all my books. Fairest was a ridiculously hard book to write. A minute ago I counted, just to see: eighty-nine versions and five names before I finished the first draft.

After I’ve sent the manuscript to my editor and have gotten back her edits and her astonishingly long editorial letter (eighteen single-spaced pages for Fairest), I rename the file again. I usually call it edit at that point, edit1. I’m revising now for my editor, but also for me, so I may still veer off into unexplored territory.

Even with this elaborate method, I lose small revisions, but I don’t care about those. Nothing important is lost.

On the downside, gems from an earlier version that I want to use later can be hard to find. So I have another file called extra. When I delete something I like, I copy it into my extra file. The bit I like doesn’t have to be a whole scene, although it can be. It can also be a neat phrase, or anything I think I might need at some point. My extra file is shorter than a whole version, more manageable. Usually I remember a phrase or key word from the bit I want that I can search on. My extra file gives me a huge sense of security.

And speaking of security, you do back everything up, right? (Kids, if you don’t know what it means to “back up,” ask your parents.) Because there’s no point to an elaborate version system if you’re going to lose your precious work anyway. So save what you write!