This is the third in our month-long series of newsletters about getting organised with your writing. If you missed the first two parts, you can find them here:
If you're not a novelist, don't worry: we're going to be looking at social media and blog posts during the next two weeks.
I'll admit it: I'm really bad at organising novels! Every time I've started a novel since, um, 2006, I've told myself
that this time I will have a spreadsheet of dates and places and viewpoint characters so I can keep track of it all...
...and every time, I get carried away with the writing and forget to actually nail down exactly when and where scenes are taking place. (This makes for a lot of fiddly tweaking in the redrafts!)
I've finally admitted that spreadsheets probably aren't the best solution for me. Here's how you can organise your
novel, even if you've already a long way in.
Five minute fix:
Keep story-wide information in a document or a note in Evernote (or a page / section of a paper notebook). For me, this includes things like:
- How I write certain words ("no-one" or "no one"?)
- Details about characters' schedules (e.g. one of my characters has a 3 year old who's in nursery in the mornings)
- Characters' eye
colour (if it's actually mentioned in the story...)
It's entirely up to you what you include, and you may want to create several documents / notes / pages (perhaps one per character). At this stage, though, it's fine simply to create the document and jot down anything that immediately comes to mind. When you redraft your novel, you can add details into this document as they crop up.
Fifteen minute
fix:
Go through your manuscript and, for each chapter heading, add in the POV character, the time/date, and (if useful) the location.
Here's how that looks for the manuscript of my current work-in-progress:
Chapter 1 – Mark – Thursday 9th March – driving / Milton Keynes
Chapter 2 – Kay – Friday 10th March – Seth’s house
Chapter 3 – Hannah
– Saturday 11th March – Hannah & Mark’s house
Chapter 4 – Seth – Monday 13th March – Seth’s house
Chapter 5 – Edwin – Monday 13th March – Hannah & Mark’s house
Just putting in these details can help you spot areas where the timescheme is wonky (this often happens to me if I've rearranged the order of chapters at some point in the drafting
process).
Obviously, before you finalise your manuscript, you'll want to take out all these extra details in the chapter headings ... but when you're drafting and revising, you'll find that they're really helpful.
Thirty minute fix:
If you're working in Word, take half an hour to get your Styles set up properly. If you've never worked with Styles before, they can take a few
minutes to get used to ... but they're incredibly handy for all sorts of writing tasks.
Styles are particularly useful for:
- Formatting your paragraphs properly (don't hit Tab, or put in lots of spaces, to indent these!)
- Putting in chapter headings correctly (don't just change the font size individually each time ... Styles are much faster)
- Creating a table of contents in seconds (you need to have chapter
headings in properly to do this)
- Turning your manuscript into an Amazon Kindle ebook (again, you need chapter headings and correctly formatted paragraphs for this to work well)
Which of these tasks will you tackle today ... or this week? Once
you've had a chance to organise your novel a bit, drop by the Aliventures page to share how you got on:
www.facebook.com/aliventures
