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Showing posts with label organization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label organization. Show all posts

Friday, April 8, 2011

Organization

Do other authors have trouble keeping all their writing ideas together? I have 4-5 stories partially written at any given time--over the years, I've started several books, then gotten busy with other projects and not gone back to them. Sometimes I get back "into" a story for a while and jot some notes, and I usually scribble some stuff down when I'm first planning.

The book I'm working on now required quite a few pages of notes on certain characters, plus I've learned I do best if I write down at least the outline for a scene when I'm thinking about it, and then writing the events (by typing them) goes much smoother. So I've got all these papers, all over the place. Lists of goals, motivations, conflicts, events, time lines for a couple of the books... and they've kinda been scattered on a clipboard, in my laptop bag, a file in the file cabinet.

I really couldn't take it any more, because every time I got thinking about a story and wanted to go review what I had, I'd need to go digging in all 3 or 4 places to find those notes. So I created a "system" for myself. (looking at the photo, I'm sure it doesn't seem all that original, LOL) Each of the 5 sections in the notebook is for a different story, and each section has its own pocket for me to stick loose pages that belong with it.

The pen is very important, too. And when hubby swiped my other one in that color, I had to go buy a new pack of G2s just for that shade... I mean, it needed to match with what I'd been working on, right? Different color would just destroy the continuity of the whole book!

How do you keep your writing organized?

Autumn Piper
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