Long Division with Remainders

When I was in 5th grade, Mr. Dilworth used to dump my desk on the floor at least once a week – paper, notes, pencils and books heaped at my feet. I didn’t organize my desk the way he thought I should, and this was his way of making me toe his line. Well, it didn’t work. Aside from scaring the bejeezus out of me, his methods confused me and I lost things. The moral of this story is that everyone needs to organize the way it works for her. Anne and I are polar opposites when it comes to working styles, but we both have structures that allow us to manage our writing.

Anne is a master of structure and organization. She writes outlines to die for, researches thoroughly, and organizes her notes before she writes. Her house always looks good too.

I am more of a nester, happily building my piles of notes and drafts until they surround me with a comfortable quilt of ideas and paper. Aaahhh. Everything right there where I can see it and put my fingers on it. A few coffee stains are simply the seasoning for fine ideas. And my house…well, it’s better since the kids grew up.

But style should not be confused with sloppy organization. Anne and I both spend serious time ensuring our prep work and the structure of the story keep things moving. There are two parts to that – the internal plan of the work which is mostly evident when it falters (Anne discussed this quite elegantly) and the external handling of large files that contain a myriad of ideas and scenes. When that falls apart, scenes are lost and rewrites vanish. It’s an ugly place to be – I know because it has happened to me, once when notes were lost and again when a computer crashed. It felt like Mr. Dilworth had gotten into my cyberspace!

As a result, I have built a straight-forward system for managing my files which protects me from the vagaries of space, time and déja vu.

First, I like color coding and compartmentalizing. I buy colored file folders and I sort my hand-written and printed notes according to subject with specific colors for each topic. For example, landscape plays a large part in my writing, so research on flora and fauna goes into (surprise!) a green folder. My new computer allows me to color code files on my desktop, so those are also coordinated. Books are tagged with color-coded post-it notes. I will have literally hundreds of articles and snippets of research before I am finished a manuscript, so this at-a-glance system is critical.

And where to put the files when they are not actually in use? The all-over-the-floor storage worked for me until I produced children and acquired affectionate dogs with muddy feet. I bought a clear plastic file box that sits beside my desk and holds the files for the project-in-progress. A second tub lives under the printer table with the projects that are in waiting. Completed work goes into a traditional filing cabinet. The kids are grown up, but the dogs still have muddy feet, so the system stays.

My outlines are mostly a few pages of scribbles and then I write. This means I also rewrite a lot. Sometimes the next great idea isn’t so great after all, so I want the old version. To keep my drafts accessible, I copy files and rename them numerically or by date, saving every version and working ahead on the latest document until I want to try yet another direction or idea. Usually I end up with between 15 and 25 saved drafts for any one book. I print about every fifty pages or so, only reprinting anything that is radically new. Documents are saved every few days on a flash drive or disk, and emailed to a separate account where they reside in cyberspace.

As I write, my characters and story lines become more complex. No matter how absorbed I am in this alternate reality, I can’t remember all the bits and pieces. So, I create tables and charts either on my computer or across large sheets of paper that are pinned to my bulletin boards. Everything at a glance.

And organizing this stuff doesn’t even have anything to do with the story! But it builds the bridge between the wandering dream and physical world. Only the one who creates the bridge knows what went into the supports that hold it up.

f & f
Susan