Critique_This_WIP

On the consensus – as far as I’ve understood it – writer and organizer do not go hand in hand. Something about the right side of your brain battling the left side. I don’t really know. What I do know… I fit in with the majority here. I’m very disorganized, even when I try desperately to become organized. The idea for this post came to me as I posted on my blog the other day.

So below I’ll go through the most popular ways I’ve heard/tried/seen to get and stay organized, and why they didn’t work for me (but very well may work for you). Then I’ll tell you the one thing that has worked for me – thus far.

How about color-coded folders, dividers, sorters, and binders? Not a bad idea, truly. You can use a different color folder for each aspect of your writing – for example red for sexy, blue for hero, pink or purple for heroine, etc. As well as different colored sorter (in filing cabinet) for submissions (green), rejections (red or black). The options are only limited by the number of colored articles that you own. And this way worked for me, for a short period of time. Then it became more of a hassle to keep up with and organize then it was worth. I’d file something and then have to dig through tons of loose-leaf papers in a single folder or file. When I did finally find the “area” I needed then I had to read through paragraph after paragraph to find the one little tidbit I was looking for.

Try Post-It notes for quick access to tidbits, you say? Been there, can’t do that. While I am disorganized, I am also a perfectionist (talk about an oxymoron, right?!) I hate clutter, it drives me insane. Not to mention the sticky on Post-It’s wears off, they curl up and you have to tape them down. Don’t get me wrong. I love Post-It notes… for certain things. *Side note coming on* I recently read a post on Rachel Vincent’s blog and read her post titled This is How I Plot that detailed her plot methods using Post-It’s and a dry erase board. While I’ve found lots of different ways to plot, her method has helped me find my method more than any other (before I’d stumbled onto her post I was using Index Cards to write down scenes... using the Post-It’s and dry erase help get me more organized pre-writing). I digress. Unless I’m using Post-It’s for plotting, they’re out of any current MS/WIP’s tidbits for me.

Okay, what about spiral notebooks? They’re bound together, pages can’t get lost (easily)… you can even get them pre-divided in 3 or 5 subject sections, right? Yeah, you can. But then I’m back to my original problem… searching for a few words of information in pages upon pages of written words.

Excel, a program offered by Microsoft general in most – if not all – of their Office programs. After a stint in business school, I was all about Excel. I loved it. And I still use it. For managing my household budget. But that’s it. The amount of time it takes to get everything set up and arranged (not to mention the various tweaking when certain entries become larger than previous ones) is frustrating and takes time away from my writing. Quite a bit of time, actually. If you stick with it and you get everything you want for quick reference on Excel, then you have ten or twenty or however amount of saved files on your computer. Again… you have to shift through each one… open and close until you find exactly what you are looking for.


Then there’s Microsoft Word. I think we all know this program. It’s the one we write with. True, you can create tables within Word’s documents, but we’re back to the same issues with Excel. Time consuming, lots of files, shifting through endless data to find that one piece of info. Next.

And now for what – to me – is a God send to us writers. A truly “Gotta-Have” for writers. As Kaye Dacus commented on my blog “You're correct---this is the Must-Have Writer's Tool of the century (so far)!” And what would this marvel be, you wonder? Well, none other than OneNote – yet another program offered by Microsoft (2007/2010 Home and Student and higher editions or purchased individually).

In this one program you can add and save multiple “Notebooks”. Inside each Notebook you can add individual tabs; in each of those tabs you can add more tabs. You know what that means? Tons of information right at your fingertips, under one file, inside one program. You can add pictures, copy and paste from the web (it will automatically show where the info was pasted from for future references or whatnot).

Within each Notebook (in my case, MS/WIP) you can keep track of submissions, houses, maps, characters, plot points. Whatever you need. Having found OneNote so far already into No Shame for the Wicked’s MS I’m having to spend more time adding information then I would like, but I truly believe the program – and the convenience of having all my info right at my fingertips – will far outweigh any inconvenience entering data will provide.

Already I’ve found a couple of plot issues that would have passed my attention until much later. Oh, and creating tables inside OneNote? Piece of cake. Really and truly. A simply click of the tab key creates a new column, when you're done with that just hit enter. Ta-Da. Instant column's and rows... as many as you need.



This is a picture of information for No Shame for the Wicked saved inside OneNote. I’ve pointed out various tabs to help explain what I meant by earlier comments. For me, OneNote is proving to be the one tool that can keep me organized and focused on my writing. I can tell you, from this day forward, OneNote will be on every computer I own, just as Word is.