Getting Organized, Part 2

Last week I started telling you about how to organize your novel. It’s a big task, but happily, not a difficult. If you missed part 1, it’s here. In it I discuss what you need to organize and got started by talking about how to organize your characters. Today, I’ll move on to your plot.

You might have thought that you had a lot to organize with your characters – all those worksheets, interviews and what-not. Well, that was nothing when compared to what you need for your entire plot! Especially if you’re a plotter like me – although, I have to admit I don’t hold a candle to Darynda Jones (one of my favorite authors) who writes a detailed forty (4-0!!) page outline.

I will graph out my story structure (see this post on your story structure options) and write an outline (usually five pages or so, but definitely not forty). And then I’ll create scene charts for many (although not usually all) of the scenes in my book. These charts can be as simple as:

which can fit onto a 3×5 card or a sticky note for storyboarding (see this fantastic article on storyboarding by Joan Swan at Romance University.)

Or, I’ve got a full page version for my binder which covers more detail for my binder (in my book, Chapter One).

If you’re doing this on the computer, you should probably consider using a writing program like YWriter (free!), WriteWay or Scrivener. They make organizing your plot easy – basically allowing you to create a virtual storyboard, but the sticky notes can be anything from your scene chart or the entire written scene – or both.

And finally, if you want an easy way to see all of your scenes at once (and haven’t storyboarded – or even if you have!) creating a scene table in Word or Excel is incredibly handy. This is what mine looks like,

but you can have whatever you want in the columns – although I would recommend, at the minimum, the super-brief description and the conflict in each scene. Whatever else you add after that is up to you and what you know you need to keep track of.

The last two sections of your binder (or tab in OneNote) is research and notes. If you write anything that requires research (almost anything) you’ll want to keep it all together in one place. Please do because you don’t want to be doing that all a second time because you’ve lost your notes. And I always pre-write before I write a scene in order to get myself into character and into the time and place and situation of the scene – it helps me write deeper. All of that writing I keep in my notes section, along with ideas for future scenes, thoughts on scenes I’ve already written and what I need to change.

The most important lesson in all this is that there is no “right” way to organize your novel. And just because you do it one way for one book, doesn’t mean you can’t do it another way for the next.

Have fun! Play with it! Do whatever feels right for you.