Organizing from the Stone Age

With my new novel, Last Bets, going into pre-orders this month, heading down the road to publication in April, I’m allowing myself clean up time. Creating a book is a messy process, at least for me, with many tools that are not relegated to the computer. I call them my Stone Age organizing tools, and each one has helped me out of a jam with this book.

January is a great time of year for clean up. My whole house, if I have energy, gets a chance for a redo. Books I’ve finished with, clothes I’ll never wear, that junk drawer that’s gotten so full it won’t close, the back storage room shelves (I don’t even remember what they contain), everything gets a chance to be sorted and de-cluttered. I start bins and bags for giveaways. Each day, try to get something in them.

A friend tried a great trick for organizing her life. She took the days of the month and got rid of that number of items. For instance, the first of the month would be one item put into the giveaway box. The fifteenth would be fifteen items. Small or large, it didn’t matter. She said she loved doing it, the freedom and openness it brought to her life.

I’m doing the same, only with my book project. I’m sorting and reviewing the tools, the assists, I used for Last Bets, looking at what worked and what I learned from it.

When I’m in process with a manuscript, traveling through the initial steps of envisioning the story, structuring it, developing my awareness of the characters, revising and getting feedback, then finishing up the journey with pre-publication tasks like cover design, blurbs, and legal data, it creates a wild mess in my writing studio. A mess I love, truthfully. But in order to move on to the next project, to feel real completion, I have to review and sort and file and close up shop on that particular book. I might take photos of my storyboards, the collages I’ve created for the characters, print and paste them into the writing notebook I make for each book. I like to go through the file folders on my desktop and on my desk, decide what to keep and what to toss. I like to browse the baskets of objects that prompted me as I wrote, got me unstuck so many times with their sensory reminders. I might discard or keep photographs and maps of the book’s setting. I might archive my playlists.

It’s all great fun, and super satisfying to do. It gives me both closure and a sense of something well done. Accomplishment and all that hard work acknowledged, while I wait for the book to be published.

This week, I thought I’d give you an insider look into one author’s system of organization, what helps me build and birth a book, including those tangible assists that give certain parts of myself such pleasure.

Assist #1: the project box

This is an idea I stole from Twyla Tharp! She is famous for her project boxes and I loved having one. In her world of choreography, each dance gets its own new box. Into that box she puts her notes, objects, fabric samples, videos, anything that has to do with what she’s creating.

I loved the concept of a project box, because it helped me feel more organized and focused. Also, it limited the detritus of book creating to one container (when possible!). I chose a big basket I could set on the floor by my desk in my writing studio. In the project box for Last Bets, I put scuba-diving photos from years ago when I used to travel and dive. I added shells to bring in the beach feel, since the novel takes place on a Caribbean island. I even found a piece of fabric that reminded me of gauzy beachwear. Images and character sketches went into the box.

Imagine the fun—and creative thrill—of sorting through all that cool stuff whenever writer’s block arrived. My project box (or basket) acknowledged a tangible part of the creative process that I couldn’t always find on a computer screen.

One stalled-out day, when I couldn't write another word, I reached into the box for images of my book’s world—the island, the green ocean, the wind in the palm trees. I pasted them on the outside of a large notebook which became my repository for ideas, scenes, words, and written stuff the box would lose. It lasted a year, and the images on the outside never failed to lead me back into juicy writing.

What might go into a project box for your current writing project?

Assist #2: colored file folders for clustering chapters

I go a little crazy in office supply and art stores. I’m a painter when I’m not writing, so color means everything to me. Naturally, when I learned of this second assist, I stocked up on colored file folders in brilliant shades, like the photo above.

What I did with these was even more helpful: on the outside of each, I brainstormed my chapters.

For a nonfiction book, this is a no brainer—my outline or plan is usually more concrete and predictable. When I’m working on a novel, I might not know exactly the way chapters will fall. So I approximate.

First, I make a list of chapter themes or topics or titles. Each one gets a colored folder (the color choice doesn’t matter to me, but you may want to choose a certain color for pivotal chapters). Using contrasting markers, I draw a circle on the outside of the folder and write the title or purpose or theme inside it. One folder per chapter for nonfiction books or stories where I’m fairly certain of the trajectory; if I’m not, one major turning point or theme per folder.

Do you know the brainstorming technique called clustering or mind mapping? Click on those links to find out more. I draw spokes from each circle and write ideas for sections or scenes within the chapter. Sometimes the idea/spoke will generate sub ideas, which become sub spokes.

I suggest, if you try this, to let any ideas come—no censoring. One of the beauties of clustering or mind maps is that they embrace the non-linear brain as well as the logical line-up. Often, I found inspiration where it would’ve been missed.

Assist #3: storyboards

From the clusters, the chapter spider webs that I’m forming, I transition to a storyboard. It’s easiest for me to demonstrate this assist or tool via a video I made many years ago, when I started teaching storyboarding for writers. I use a W storyboard, which was originally created by Joseph Campbell of Hero’s Journey fame.

There are many, many storyboarding tutorials online now—it’s become a trend and I’m glad to see that, because when I began teaching it 25 years ago, it was an oddity.

Storyboards are incredibly useful when you get to the point of itching to organize all the bits and pieces.

Electronic assists

Back to my clean-up time. After the tangible organizing assists are reviewed and sorted and cleaned out, acknowledging all their gifts to the years I worked on this book, I face the tangle on the computer.

Last Bets generated many files of chapters, full drafts, revisions, and supplemental material like agent queries, feedback, and emails. I had a whole folder in my Word docs and many more in a wonderful software called Scrivener, one of the more intuitive writing systems I’ve used.

Software always includes learning time, for me, so I was fortunate to have a knowledgeable writing buddy get me started.

Why use it? For many reasons. Consider a 250-350 page book, which translates to the same number of pages of manuscript copy. I tend to write about 30 drafts of each book I publish (no, I’m not kidding!). So the sheer amount of documents in my Word folder for that book is astonishing. Not only that, juggling all of them in a word-processing system didn’t work as page count grew.

Scrivener’s elegance is its ability to handle draft upon draft, into revision, and organize them into folders that are easily accessible. It allowed me to explore and expand, to not be limited by the linear approach of Word. I needed also to be able to rearrange the order of the chapters as I tested positioning on my storyboard.

When I first began writing books back in the late 80s, I edited on hard (printed out) copy and input corrections into a new Word document each time. A master file for the manuscript, individual files for each chapter, all the chapter (and manuscript) revisions—it was overwhelming. By the time the manuscript was ready to send off to agent or editor, it had become a full file drawer of iterations.

I wrote five books this way, all published, selling well for years. I remember moving from the house where I did most of those books and struggling to throw out all the paper copies with their edits. It felt like destroying history.

After I found Scrivener, I wrote and published five more books, but the process was eons easier. I took online classes from Scrivener guru Gwen Hernandez and learned enough to do all the things I wanted—the software has many more bells and whistles than I need.

All these assists, both tangible and electronic, help me create books I’m proud of. Over the thirty years I’ve been writing and publishing, I’ve honed my method of organizing, and although some of it is Stone Age to others, it works for me. Maybe one of these ideas will help you on your book journey, too.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Browse the assists above. Use them as fuel to explore your current organization and what it might be missing.

Pick an idea that interests you and try it out, even a little.

What intrigued you, that you might test out for yourself?