My Writing Notes Have Always Been a Hot Mess

As all writers should, I have a “dumping ground” to write ideas that might pop into my head at any given moment.

Some people call these moments ‘inspiration’. And perhaps they are, but I’ve noticed these moments typically don’t come unless you’re letting unfinished stories live in your head long enough for them to flourish and start making more sense.

And not just the back of your head; If you want them to happen frequently, they need to be in the forefront. (The best way to get your stories in the forefront is through reading and writing often.)

If you find yourself thinking about your stories often enough, wonder of wonders, they start automatically repairing themselves, tying up loose ends.

It’s a natural phenomenon, or perhaps even a magical one–Who am I to say? But it happens in all creative minds when trying to piece together a story.

It can certainly feel like a miracle. Especially those eureka moments, those game-changers that seemingly come out of nowhere to interrupt your train of thought and make everything in your story suddenly fall into place, those moments that have you scrambling like mad to record your thoughts before they’re gone.

Of course, you can’t predict exactly when these moments of inspiration will happen. So hopefully a major revelation doesn’t happen at an inopportune time such as when you’re stuck in a public restroom stall, or in the middle of an exercise routine you don’t want to quit, or when you’re driving in heavy traffic.

If it does, turn off the music and keep repeating to yourself over and over what you’re supposed to remember until you can get to your dumping ground of choice.

For those writers who aren’t allergic to transcribing, carrying around a notepad and pen or an electronic voice recorder might be ideal for you. Texting in an app such as Evernote is also a popular choice.

My Solution. And the Problems It Brings.

All my scene ideas, blog post ideas, all the names and terminology I might use, the writing tips I like, the marketing ideas I may try to one day put into action, and even the full-on dialogue that comes to mind while I’m mowing the lawn, showering, or whatever else, go into a single simple text document (.txt) in no particular order (except perhaps chronologically).

I just open up regular ol’ Notepad and type down my ideas in paragraph form, and then put the project name after it in parentheses, such as

The pale crimson of the Anchor Moon shone above him, the cause of this perpetual storm, this restless sea, and all the gravitational anomalies. (FIVE RINGS)

Now I might use that snippet in the book, I might not. It’s not particularly great prose, but it’s not bad either. And if I do use it, it’ll probably get edited to the point where it’s almost unrecognizable versus how it reads here. But if you don’t write these things down, they probably won’t make it into the book at all.

Now I happen to know exactly where this line would go in the novel. But sometimes I put location reminders in anyway, such as

“When the ambassador from the Fourth Ring arrives: Blah blah blah Setting. “Dialogue.” (This can be said to Rabbit.) Blah. (WEB OF HEARTS)”

It’s nice having a clear reminder of where I thought these snippets were supposed to go at the time I was writing them down, because otherwise I may forget the context and be unable to figure it out, let alone what project it was supposed to be matched with.

Sometimes it’s so bad I have to put the unlabeled notes that fail to jog my memory in a text document labeled ‘unknown’, and most of what goes in there never comes back out.

Unknown notes happened to me a lot more back when I didn’t bother to tag the project name at the end of my snippets. So adding something like (THE MACHINE) as a tag at the end of a snippet was a huge step in the right direction for keeping my notes organized. Adding a little more context beyond that can never hurt, either.

So I’ve got this document of shame, as I’ve called it in the past; This huge, unwieldy text document full of loose notes that has built up to unhealthy proportions due to years of neglect. And I needed motivation to comb through it and try to make sense of it all.

But even with the labels, it felt like a chore. Like Spring cleaning.

The Problems…Compounded.

To make matters worse, it turned out I had loose story-related notes in .txt documents all over the place: A few on my old laptop, some on the C: drive, some on the E: drive, some that failed to sync only to create divergent spin-off copies, several documents in a forgotten story folder, snippets I’d typed down in the midst of documents that were meant for something else entirely, and even snippets in .txt docs within work notes in one of my work folders. It was a mess and it felt overwhelming, rapidly approaching inapproachable.

(Consequences like this are definitely a mark against the procrastination “strategy”.)

But it also felt like what was there was crucial, a treasure trove that I couldn’t continue writing my manuscripts without. Each of those brainstorm moments needed to be carefully considered and weighed for how they might impact and transform my projects moving forward. There were duds in there, but there were also many gems. Even a few breakthrough eureka moments that I knew would help make my stories that much better.

So I had no choice but to figure out a way to more easily organize those snippets and marry them to my actual projects, and I think I finally found a great way to do just that.

See you next time.