Organizing Research
We writers understand the difficulty communicating via the written word alone presents. Without facial expressions, body language, or voice tone, it's an uphill struggle. Hence, emoticons and the constant refrain to show and not tell.
I use blog posts to inform and strive to do so in an interesting manner. Its very nature, however, lends itself to sometimes appearing dogmatic and authoritative. No two words could be farther from my personality. Unless, of course, the subject is adverbs. Then I, ahem, wholeheartedly
embrace it.
So the methods I will outline here are meant to present alternatives, options, and perhaps spur your imagination to initiate your own techniques in the nuts and bolts of organizing one's research. Do share yours. Writers are always on the lookout for better mousetraps.
No doubt about it. If you aspire to more than 3-star reviews, research is essential and we are more than fortunate to live in the age we do. Obviously, our predecessors did but can any of us imagine writing without a word processor? Modern information systems have freed us from the restrictions of writing what we know. Search engines permit limitless imaginations.
But how to research is not the subject of this post. All I will affirm here is, 1, my conviction the Internet has everything, needing only the properly phrased search query. And 2, about eight to ten pages of research produces one paragraph of plot. So, where to store it all?
Having it scattered across your hard drive in documents, post-its, notes, and folders soon gets old. It's what I used to do and requires mental effort to track it all. Instead, research is tailor-made for a database. Wait! Stop that eye-rolling!
I use Microsoft Office. It comes with one built-in that requires NO programming - OneNote. But
you're not limited to that. Google 'electronic assistant', 'personal organizer', 'information
manager', and you'll get pages of suggestions. The Personal Organizers actually look like those
bulky things we once opened at meetings to appear important when asked what our schedule
looked like. But since Office is ubiquitous, I'll use it to frame the discussion.
Its interface could not be simpler or more intuitive. It's based on, and looks like, the note books
used in school that we divided by colored tabs and identified by subject. I've created one, repeat one, Note Book that contains multiple sections identified by novel title. Each section contains multiple pages on which I paste the researched data. And each page can be specifically named.
So if I click on a particular novel, it lists the following pages: Factoids, Protagonist, Antagonist,
Characters, Timeline (to track seasonal changes), Chapters (one-sentence summaries), and the universal 'Misc'.
You can search by page, novel, or the entire Note Book. One feature I find invaluable is the ability to paste images allowing the 'Factoid' page to contain maps of the places, regions, and cities the plot revolves around.
Incidentally, if any of you are also planning an assault on the Papal living quarters, the Vatican has an online map of it. Get it now. Once I release my new novel I suspect it will disappear.
OneNote automatically adds a live link that identifies the source when anything is pasted to it. If you use OneNote, then you probably use Windows and it can be configured to automatically paste stuff found on the Internet into OneNote's unassigned category. It's a timesaver that allows your research to continue until once logged off. You can then move the researched data into permanent locations at your leisure.
If you require further organization, OneNote allows the creation on any page of multi-column tables you can add rows to as the data grows. Text formatting options are a click away and since it is 2017, OneNote is cloud-ready allowing safe, off site backup of all your work.
But what about that catch-all, junk drawer? You know what I'm talking about. Where you throw stuff in that doesn't belong anywhere else. Separated by a blank page, mine is at the bottom of my active manuscript. It's crammed full of, you know, stuff. Writer stuff. Like this.
- an em dash (I can never remember the keyboard shortcut or menu location)
* * * chapter break (otherwise Word starts a bullet list)
Dates, notes to self, foreign words (Chuanggua - Shaolin long robe)
Unused names: Jacek Kominski, Bernardino Farnese
Extra (real) titles in case I need them: President of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City
State, Chief Curator of the Louvre
And lots more but brevity obtains. None of it is organized. It's a junk drawer. If you have categories and methodologies I haven't thought of, please do share.
As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments.
P.S.
In my post of January13th, The Case For and Against Adverbs, I mentioned an editor who alerted me to the redundancies the preposition 'of' sometimes creates. I read the following in the, umm, august, New York Times.
"These new Earth-size planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist-1 about 40 light-years from Earth. Some of them could have water on their surfaces."
Appalling.
I use blog posts to inform and strive to do so in an interesting manner. Its very nature, however, lends itself to sometimes appearing dogmatic and authoritative. No two words could be farther from my personality. Unless, of course, the subject is adverbs. Then I, ahem, wholeheartedly
embrace it.
So the methods I will outline here are meant to present alternatives, options, and perhaps spur your imagination to initiate your own techniques in the nuts and bolts of organizing one's research. Do share yours. Writers are always on the lookout for better mousetraps.
No doubt about it. If you aspire to more than 3-star reviews, research is essential and we are more than fortunate to live in the age we do. Obviously, our predecessors did but can any of us imagine writing without a word processor? Modern information systems have freed us from the restrictions of writing what we know. Search engines permit limitless imaginations.
But how to research is not the subject of this post. All I will affirm here is, 1, my conviction the Internet has everything, needing only the properly phrased search query. And 2, about eight to ten pages of research produces one paragraph of plot. So, where to store it all?
Having it scattered across your hard drive in documents, post-its, notes, and folders soon gets old. It's what I used to do and requires mental effort to track it all. Instead, research is tailor-made for a database. Wait! Stop that eye-rolling!
I use Microsoft Office. It comes with one built-in that requires NO programming - OneNote. But
you're not limited to that. Google 'electronic assistant', 'personal organizer', 'information
manager', and you'll get pages of suggestions. The Personal Organizers actually look like those
bulky things we once opened at meetings to appear important when asked what our schedule
looked like. But since Office is ubiquitous, I'll use it to frame the discussion.
Its interface could not be simpler or more intuitive. It's based on, and looks like, the note books
used in school that we divided by colored tabs and identified by subject. I've created one, repeat one, Note Book that contains multiple sections identified by novel title. Each section contains multiple pages on which I paste the researched data. And each page can be specifically named.
So if I click on a particular novel, it lists the following pages: Factoids, Protagonist, Antagonist,
Characters, Timeline (to track seasonal changes), Chapters (one-sentence summaries), and the universal 'Misc'.
You can search by page, novel, or the entire Note Book. One feature I find invaluable is the ability to paste images allowing the 'Factoid' page to contain maps of the places, regions, and cities the plot revolves around.
Incidentally, if any of you are also planning an assault on the Papal living quarters, the Vatican has an online map of it. Get it now. Once I release my new novel I suspect it will disappear.
OneNote automatically adds a live link that identifies the source when anything is pasted to it. If you use OneNote, then you probably use Windows and it can be configured to automatically paste stuff found on the Internet into OneNote's unassigned category. It's a timesaver that allows your research to continue until once logged off. You can then move the researched data into permanent locations at your leisure.
If you require further organization, OneNote allows the creation on any page of multi-column tables you can add rows to as the data grows. Text formatting options are a click away and since it is 2017, OneNote is cloud-ready allowing safe, off site backup of all your work.
But what about that catch-all, junk drawer? You know what I'm talking about. Where you throw stuff in that doesn't belong anywhere else. Separated by a blank page, mine is at the bottom of my active manuscript. It's crammed full of, you know, stuff. Writer stuff. Like this.
- an em dash (I can never remember the keyboard shortcut or menu location)
* * * chapter break (otherwise Word starts a bullet list)
Dates, notes to self, foreign words (Chuanggua - Shaolin long robe)
Unused names: Jacek Kominski, Bernardino Farnese
Extra (real) titles in case I need them: President of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City
State, Chief Curator of the Louvre
And lots more but brevity obtains. None of it is organized. It's a junk drawer. If you have categories and methodologies I haven't thought of, please do share.
As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments.
P.S.
In my post of January13th, The Case For and Against Adverbs, I mentioned an editor who alerted me to the redundancies the preposition 'of' sometimes creates. I read the following in the, umm, august, New York Times.
"These new Earth-size planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist-1 about 40 light-years from Earth. Some of them could have water on their surfaces."
Appalling.
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