Hi everyone! Back here again with another post for this week. I’m super excited to be here again for the second post in our new series. In case you missed last week (because sometimes I’m really bad at posting on social media and being found there as well) you can check it out under the developing tag on the website’s main blog page. School has started up for me once again and I will hopefully be able to keep up a consistent update schedule despite all the classes I am taking and all the work I have to do this semester. But today’s topic is both related to writing and to studying effectively. So, without further ado…
Develop As A Writer: Making An Organized System
One of the things that I know I struggled with at the beginning of my writing and continue to struggle with at different times is being organized as a writer. This could be being organized when it comes to keeping your facts straight, your book titles straight, your goals straight, or your materials. Whatever way it is, staying organized as a writer can be a bit difficult and strange. But staying organized is essential to keeping all your writing information straight and keeping up with a clean enough desk space to do the writing you want. Throughout this post I intend to talk about different ways to organize different aspects of being a writer.
Organizing your goals
I first want to talk about organizing your goals because last week’s post was about how to make, keep, and develop goals. Keeping track of your goals once you made them was also a simple part of last week’s post and to continue with that, I would like to give a few ideas of the best way to organize your goals.
First, last week I wrote about how you could achieve your goals by tracking them with personalized trackers. However, making a tracker for your goal is not helpful if you can’t remember where you placed it. This is where organizing comes in handy. Make a place where you can keep all your trackers that is visible and easy to remember. Some people hang them on the wall, others place them all alongside each other in a binder, and others will draw their trackers into a journal together. Whatever way would make it easy for you to remember, look at, and keep on top of. I used to write my trackers for the month into my bullet journal, so I saw them every day when I opened it to write down my check lists. Nowadays I keep them pinned to a cork board on the wall or make them events on my actual calendar, so I see them every day.
The second way that I’ve seen people organize their goals is by writing down the actual end goal (rather than the tracker) and putting it somewhere they will see it everyday at the beginning of the day. I had a friend who always did this with her goals, but she would put them on the mirror of her bathroom where she stood to brush her hair everyday and while brushing her hair, she would read her goals and make plans on how to achieve them that day. I had a friend who wrote her daily goal at the top of every one of her checklists so every time she completed a task, she would remember her writing goal for the day. I used to write my goals on a sticky note and stick them to my computer so I would see them every day when I sat down to do homework or write. Nowadays I have them taped to my wall write by my door handle, so I see them every time I leave my room.
Whatever kind of organization you need to do to keep track of your goals the main point is to make sure you write them down in some way and make them visible through routines that you have already established. Don’t try to make a new routine just for the sake of remembering your goals – make them a part of your everyday routines.
Organizing your materials
If you’ve been a writer for a while, you will probably begin to notice that your material piles up. It may be actual paper material and notes and notebooks full of unfinished stories, or it may be documents upon documents upon saved webpage upon webpage on your computer. But either way, keeping track of all your materials is an easy way to begin the process of organizing.
The first thing to help with organizing your material would be to make a filing system. Everyone uses a different system so if one of the one’s I suggest doesn’t work for you just make your own. Just make sure you don’t forget how it works! I have two different filing systems – one for my computer and one for my paper documents. My paper documents are a little more complicated so I will start with my computer. I have a documents folder on my computer. In this documents folder I have a folder titled Books. Inside that folder I have slightly smaller classifications such as Blog, Actual writing, Prompts, Writing tools, etc.
Some of these folders have smaller folders and some do not. My writing tools folder does not have smaller folders. It simply has several documents by type of writing tool with websites or copy and pasted quotes to help with writing. My blog folder has a folder for each series I have written. Inside those folders are each post in a separate document and the document with all the resources, sites, and friends I gather ideas from for the series. My most important folder is the Actual writing folder. That folder has types of topics including Completed, Continue Writing These, Lost Track of the Point (or Rework), Never Written, Poetry, Undeveloped Idea Box, and Other. In each of these is more folders by genre or book title.
My paper organizational system is a bit more complicated and slightly disorganized. I have a file cabinet next to my desk. Inside my filing cabinet there is a whole drawer dedicated just to writing. It is filled with binders. Each binder is a different topic, book, or type of material. I have one folder that is simply costumes, filled with all the costume ideas and color palettes I have gathered or drawn. Another folder is all the covers for all the books I’ve ever written or started writing next to a small summary of the book. Another folder is all the maps I’ve ever drawn. One of the folders is all the world building, character building and actual writing for a story called Month of the Mythics. It goes on and on. These folders aren’t quite so organized. One of the folders has a large variety of writing material and the only thing that distinguishes it as its own folder is that it’s all the writing, I did the year I was in 9th grade. This organizational system has been neglected of late as I move more into digital writing for convenience.
This is just the one way that I have found to organize my writing and writing materials. Others have their own systems for keeping organized. Find what works for you and stick to it.
Organizing your books
When I say organizing your books, I don’t simply mean your bookcase, or you stack of notebooks. I mean all the materials for very specific books. Many writers create world maps, pages upon pages of worldbuilding notes, character profiles, drawings, sketches, snips of ideas to be added later, ideas for scene changes to include, etc. all for a single book. One of the worst moments of writing is when you know there is an important character you needed to add but you can’t quite remember their name or where you wanted them to meet but you can’t seem to find the note you made.
Organizing your books and their material will help greatly with this problem. I personally have a problem especially because I always write the scenes for my books out of order, so I often loose track of which scenes I’ve already written and which scenes I just see vividly but have not yet written down. To help with this problem I often will type up a copy of the scene after I’ve written it and print it off and place it in its appropriate location in the binder in relation to other scenes I’ve written.
When it comes to digital information about a book, I often will place it in the folder with the book or book series title on it. If it’s a series, I will place the information in the folder of the specific book that it originates from or in the folder for the series if it’s important for all the books. For paper material I will often create a folder or binder, separate from the actual writing of the book, that has organizers. For the series I have been writing for about 6 years I have a binder separated into, one use material (unused), one use material (used), location information, character information, plot information and edits, and misc. These folders help me to keep track of the material and find the material quickly when needed.
Some people organize their book materials using websites that help you do it such as 4thewords or Scrivener. I personally prefer to do all the organizing by hand because I have my own system, but everyone does it differently. Try out different things, don’t be afraid to experiment.
I hope that this week’s post on being organized as a writer was helpful. It’s a good skill to develop if you want to continue on as a writer or even become published. Being organized is not necessarily required but it does help in your development. If you have any other suggestions on how to organize or would like to share ways that you organize, don’t be afraid to become a blog page member and follow the forums. Also don’t forget to follow me on social media at the links below. I’ll be next week with the next piece of advice for how to develop as a writer. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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