Hi, I'm Sharon. I am having a simple organizational problem with the 2nd draft of my 2nd novel. I am desperate for a quick chat with a writer of books or a journalist. Please contact me if we can chat online or via the telephone. I promise not to take more than 15 minutes of your time. Thank you so much! sharonrpo@netzero.com

Can you not tell us what the problem is?

Dee

Oh absolutely! Generally I write my 1st drafts meticulously, each paragraph as good as I can get it b4 I move on. This was an experiment where I just "got it down" on paper, thinking I'd do all that editing on the 2nd draft. While I was working on that 1st draft (several years ago), I created about 15 supporting files (each many pages long) indicating changes I needed to make. They all have great info in them but they're all different and many quite vague, such as comments about fleshing out relationships early in the narrative. These files are a mixture of info on the plot, on character, on motive, you name it; it's a mess.
I hoped a more experienced author or journalist could give me some direction on how I might go about organizing all this information, logged in different ways in different files, so I'd have a method of incorporating this ancillary data into the draft of the book. I know journalists often come back with boxes filled with notes and they'd need to do a similar job of pulling it all together.
Hope this makes sense ! <Eek!>

I see your problem.

Are these notes on your PC or on bits of paper? If they’re on your PC you could number them all and create a spreadsheet to keep track of them. You could have a different page for each character and – which I find more helpful – threads. My biggest problem is keeping the continuity and timelines of all the different threads so I find an Excel spreadsheet very helpful.

If your notes are on paper, I’d say get them transferred onto your PC asap and organise them as you go. Alternatively, I know one or two writers who use a card index system; one card per scene/per thread/per character. Some refine the system with different coloured cards.

Hope this helps.

Dee

Dee, thank you so much. I'm sorry to keep pestering you but you are the first person who's understood my quandary.
OK, these files are all on the PC. So, to follow your advice: Would I take one file, eg, and break it down into column 1: Who it's about; column 2: Where it needs to fit in the narrative, etc.? So if the comment refers to more than one character, I could create the same line on the spreadsheet referencing multiple characters? (Also, I'm not sure how threads work and how I'd create them on a spreadsheet - or would it have to be a database?)
On the spreadsheet, would I have the character names running down the left in column 1 and the details in other columns? Sorry, I've never done this before. And my problem is precisely as you describe: This book has a murder in it, something I've never before attempted (and may never again), and so many of these comments in each file have to do with setting up all the timelines, behind-the-scenes relationships, etc.
Again, thank you so much for your time! If there wasn't this big pond between us, I'd love to buy you a cup of coffee. BTW, my fiance is from England - he's from Rotherham near Sheffield. Are you from that area?
Take care and thanks! Sharon

Sharon, first thing I’d say is make sure you know your characters inside out. Write biogs of the main ones or have a look at this forum thread…

http://www.writewords.org.uk/forum/47_22868.asp?spage=2

there’s a couple of good character lists among the garble. My point is that, if you know your characters well enough, you don’t need spreadsheets to tell you how they would react to any given situation. So that should simplify your records!

Secondly, you might find it easier to set a date for your murder and then work backwards from there, one line per scene/activity, until you have your timeline set from the beginning. You can use different font colours for the different characters to help you see them clearly.

For your vague but important notes, I’d list what you need to write into the manuscript and then work through them. I like to change the font colour when I’ve completed a line, rather than delete it – it’s satisfying to see what you’ve done, and you might need to refer back to it in a later edit.

I’m from Northumberland originally, currently living in Halifax, hoping to escape to the west coast in the not too distant future.

Dee

There is software out there to help with this kind of thing. New Novelist is one, but to be honest, after playing with it for a few months, I went back to notes in Word documents.

One good way to get to grips with characters is to go on a long bus ride and simply imagine yourself as that character and drift off, see what happens.


Colin M

We all have our own ways of organising our work. My (unpublished) novels are all quite long and all feature the same characters, although new central characters are introduced with each one. I favour the 'mild chaos' school; basically it's all in my head, but I also have a list of every reasonably important character: birth year, spouses/significant others, offspring with dates - who's around and when, and who they're with at that point in time, and who they're all related to, and when they died in certain cases - etc etc. I even include the birth/death years of relevant animals, just to make sure, for instance, that no one goes out for a ride on a horse who died of extreme old age three novels ago! For each separate novel I have a list of significant characters which includes important traits and their reason for being there - what it is they do in the novel that grants them existence.

I agree about knowing your characters inside out. I always write bios for them, but I discovered by accident that the best way to get to know them properly (the important ones, that is, not everyone in the novel!) is to let them talk. One of the first exercises I was asked to do during Year 1 of my degree was to write a monologue - naturally I chose Frith, the MC of my first novel 'No Mystics'. I was amazed how much I found out that I didn't know - including the fact that he was difficult to shut up once started! I also discovered that his 'voice' was stronger than my third-person narrative - so I had to re-write the whole novel - and not for the first, or last, time.

Keep your lists of people/dates/events on your computer, so you can add/change as necessary, but also always have a printed copy beside you - if you're really into the groove and just want to check a quick 'fact' it's easier and less distracting to flick the paper version, I find, than root through your files.

Hope you find a method that works for you.

Julie

Thanks so much to all of you!

There is some brilliant advice given already on this thread but I couldn't resist adding my opinion here.

No matter how you order or arrange your lists of notes (and fifteen pages isn't that much on a whole novel--it shows that you are paying attention and thinking about what you are writing), you will have to get down to making those changes sooner or later. So why not now?

I spent months prevaricating at this point. I arranged and rearranged, put the notes onto index cards, made a spreadsheet, put them into alphabetical order... it was all a big delaying tactic, for me at least. In the end I just started working through them and making those changes, no matter what order they were in. I grabbed the first note I found, read it, and dived into the mss to deal with the problem. One note at a time.

It took ages. Some notes were rendered out-od-date by some of the others but as I got more and more involved in it all, I became aware of that and it wasn't much of a problem. And in the end it worked.

I think that in the end all you can do is get writing and keep writing--which is, as we all know, easy as pie...!

That is excellent advice, thank you. What I am looking at are actually 15 separate Word documents, approx. 100 pages total. Right now, I'm going through the first draft and editing it. When I'm through I'll have a grip on what's there and what isn't. Then, as you suggest, I'll take each comment on each page and figure out how and where to work it into the overall book (and yes, I believe some of the comments are redundant or cured elsewhere). I think some of my panic stemmed from the sheer size of the first draft and since I've completed another book since I've looked back at this one, I felt overwhelmed by all the notes, not knowing where and how to fit them in. I imagine I must have felt overwhelmed even during the course of writing the first draft, which led me to keep documenting things in different ways in different files. Thank you once again; I think you have grasped my problem precisely. It's wonderful to get this sort of guidance from kindred others; my fiance wonders why the PC makes me shudder and squirm