I’ve already gone over inspiration, research, my writing setup, things that distract me, and how I stay organized in general, but now I’ll focus on how I stay organized while writing.
The brief version of it is, I am structured. With some leeway. But I’m just really structured. And there are notes. Many notes. Notes that I sometimes need to rewrite to keep a better eye on.
So, I start with the brain fart, which leads to a scene, chapter, character idea, and I let it brew in my head enough until it becomes a plot (or something similar). I write this out, beginning to end, and I come up with the main characters. Then I sum up, chapter by chapter in a few sentences, how things start and how they lead to the next part. These are usually in individual cards for me to make further notes as I go along; if not, I’ll have a separate slip of paper that I’ll fill with asterisks that refer to the different chapters.
There’s also a page where I include the basics about the characters (not all of them), like full name, age, specific physical traits that may come up (i.e. eye/hair color), likes and dislikes, mini backstory, and anything else I may feel like jotting down. I also leave space for more scribbling as I go along.
Then I start writing, with these cards and slips of paper either included in the notebook’s pocket (if it has one), or kept at the front, loose or held together with a clip.
Sometimes, though, there may be a lot of notes, as happened when I started plotting the stories for the Everything’s Fine books. The same happened with The Last Summer. And come to think of it, it was also the case for The Five. So, in these cases, I had a notebook (no, not the whole thing) with notes, and what I went to coffee shops with were the abridged versions—or a lot of photos taken with my phone that I could scroll through.
The notes-notebook (of course there’s one for writing out the story and a different one for notes) fills out after I get to writing and then editing. Especially when I’m editing. Because the order of the chapters or conflicts may need some reworking, or I might need to check that the timeline—days that go by, hours needed for traveling—makes sense, or there could be references that need to be added to different parts for things to make a bit more sense.
If I’m jotting things down on the cards, besides asterisks, using different pen colors can help, especially if it’s something I’d like to stress or that I really shouldn’t forget. If it gets too messy, I strike out the reference after I’ve written it in. And color-coding also works in the general-notes notebook, for easy finds of information that are about particular characters.
So, again, to sum up how I stay organized while writing: doodles and colors. How do you keep tabs on everything?