Trying to Organize An Army of Snippets

Even though I’d found the discipline to properly label all my writing notes/reminders/snippets and had diligently been saving them into text documents, in the end, I had way too many of them.

Imagine several more folders full of documents like the ones above.

Each document had hundreds of entries which typically included writing notes spanning six or seven different stories, umpteen blog ideas, new vocabulary words, inspiring quotes, brainstorms for flora and fauna, and various reminders for things like doctor appointments, projects I’d like to do for my kids, or books I’d like to one day read. Far too scattershot to be of any use in this format.

So what I had to do was roll up my sleeves, open the documents one at a time, and drop all the different writing snippets into their own appropriate buckets, like this one:

Above is a folder just for the notes I had on Five Rings (and the sequel books, all in the same folder for now–I can separate them out into three books later). To give you an idea, “FIVE RINGS (notes).txt” ended up holding 12,728 words-worth of snippets that spanned the entire trilogy.

In addition to the Five Rings folder, I ended up with many more buckets. Here are some examples:

• Blog ideas
• New subgenre ideas
• Marketing tips
• Quotes I like
• Writer cons and publisher submission calls
• Writing programs to try
• Writing tips and advice
• Ideas for the story “Strange Skies”
• Ideas for the story “Loop”
• Ideas for the story “The Machine”
• etc.

I’ve used this method in the past and it works fine. But you have to be careful. If you get distracted and stop this project halfway through, you could end up creating even more files and creating an even bigger mess than before, further barring you from making any headway on your works-in-progress.

So my immediate goal is, of course, that I want to finish editing The Machine by August. Which means at the moment, the notes for that particular story are most important to me.

One might think at this point I could simply open the text document entitled “Ideas for the story The Machine.txt” in one screen, pop open my manuscript in another, and I’m off to the races.

But I always run into the same problem: Trying to take a single text document–even one that has nothing but The Machine ideas and snippets in it–is not as easy to work with as it sounds. Nothing is in chronological order and there’s no way to “zoom out” to see an overview of the content.

You might think breaking that file down into smaller “buckets” might make things easier, and you’d be right, but that takes a lot more work. You wind up with way more files, and again, they’ll still not necessarily be in chronological order within their respective buckets.

Word documents, by design, are meant to stay relatively “zoomed in” so you can only see a couple of paragraphs at a time. Understandably so because it prevents you from seeing spoilers and creates a more intimate reading experience. Great for readers, not so great for writers (unless they’re “pantsers” who don’t take digital notes).

But if I were to hunt-and-peck for what I need in such a document as I write, even with the help of CTRL+F, I’d end up scrolling up and down until my pointer finger fell off.

And then there’s the ever-present temptation to edit the notes I don’t need to work with right now, again keeping me from making actual progress within my manuscript. (It would amount to pseudo-progress, a.k.a. procrastination.)

So, assuming I can turn off my inner-editor as I scroll along, I can try to group my snippets and put them in chronological order within the documents or within sub-documents. But again, a huge amount of scrolling and additional work would need to be done in this scenario, and I haven’t even begun to write yet.

What I’d often end up doing is work from the top-down, deleting snippets as I figure out ways to integrate them into my main manuscript one snippet at a time. The problem there is that the further down I go, the more snippets I see that contradict or change some of what I’ve already written.

It’s an exercise in tedium; I’d often end up rewriting the same scenes way too many times.

The Notepad++ Problem

The initial answer I found to alleviate this was something mentioned back in the post called Figuring Out What Works: Collapsible Scenes. It’s a program called Notepad++, which essentially lets you “collapse” or “expand” scenes (like code) so you can see an overview of your whole book.

The ideas was that by clicking on a + sign, I can expand a scene and write, then I can click on the – sign when I’m done so it’s small again, which would help me stay organized.

Soon, I found I could even place the relevant notes nested within the appropriate scenes, to use and have access to whenever I need to edit.

Sounds perfect, right? It also didn’t hurt that I could more easily cut and paste entire sections of the book if I needed to.

Well, it just so happened that Notepad++ was handy for organizing all of my notes. By placing snippets under the various collapsible headings, I could navigate and organize my snippets far more easily. And this method let me push farther in Five Rings than ever before, reaching about 33% of the way through the novel before I ran into too many dead ends.

But, to quote my old post:

The main drawback to using Notepad++ is that sometimes it gets confused on how to collapse and expand sections. For example, collapsing the book might leave a few chapters out, while other times, it collapses the entire book with all chapters included. (This can make you go nuts, deleting and adding unnecessary brackets to force it to behave.)

I need to figure out a better, more consistent program to use that can do something similar, and I am open to suggestions.

The problem described above really does drive me nuts. Messing around with the brackets can be a huge time-waster, and you can even end up accidentally deleting or losing track of entire sections when you’re cutting and pasting to try and move things around.

Since I had notes, scene ideas, reminders, snippets that wound up on the cutting-room-floor and all those kind of extra things nested underneath each scene, which themselves were nested within each chapter, which were then nested within each book, I ended up with an over-complicated nightmare of Matryoshka dolls, which quickly outgrew the abilities of the program.

(It seems that Notepad++ can only handle file sizes so big before it starts acting wonky, and every update I’d install didn’t seem to fix the issue.)

No one offered any suggestions or alternatives to Notepad++ back when I asked, but I think I’ve finally found the answer on my own. I’ve found a tool that not only lets me organize my notes far more easily, but it also seamlessly lets me drag and drop scenes in any order I want, creating an outline (of sorts) as I go.

See you next time.