Orderly Chaos

Where do you keep your ideas? Whether our minor characters are based on people we meet, or our plots are ripped from the headlines, all writers need a way to store nuts for winter and retrieve them later. How do you organize yours? Could it be better?

by Dietrich

When fresh ideas for a new novel drift in while I’m engaged in a work in progress, I need to jot it down, or it will likely be gone. 

These sparks end up on handwritten scraps of paper, which tend to litter my desk until I find the time to...