Organization: Sorting the information.

Welcome back for a weekly dose of organization OCD!  I’m talking about organizing your writing material this month.  I highly suggest making some sort of novel notebook or a series bible, whatever term you want to use!  I talked about the template that Lynn Viehl created that I use, and about customizing it to fit my needs – and today I want to talk about how I organize everything using the program OneNote.  If you’re not familiar with OneNote, my friend Suzan is doing a series on OneNote, check that out for some great tips.  She also, by some weird Twilight Zone synch is also talking about how she organizes her novel details in OneNote today as well.

On to this week’s topic!

Every project is different, but I have two basic approaches when starting. One is for a stand alone novel, and the other is for a series. I’ll tackle the stand alone Novel Notebook first, and then the series.  Like I said before, the tools I am using are:

• Lynn Viehl’s Novel Notebook template
• Microsoft OneNote

Stand Alone Novels

OneNote is a really awesome program that allows for a lot of fluid movement between pieces and a lot of flexibility pasting in content.  This isn’t a how to use OneNote blog, so I’m going to assume some basic familarity with the program.  If you have questions, feel free to ask away!

Now, I like to work with the Novel Notebook template  in one of the OneNote tabs.  I’ve just copied and pasted the Lynn Viehl template into a new OneNote binder and cleaned it up so that it works with the OneNote format (you can click the picture for a larger picture) In my story specific binder, I have one tab completely devoted to the Novel Notebook, which I call the Story Binder. If you look at the picture, tabs are across the top, pages are on the right. One page in the Story Binder tab contains the Lynn Viehl template with my own information filled in. As you can see, I’m still defining my plot in this picture. I use this tab a lot for keeping track of research, things that support the content of the story binder that I can click to and reference when I need to. The Story Binder tab is completely devoted to information. I have other tabs which I talked about last week when we discussed customizing to fit your needs.

Series Bible

For a series, I organize differently. Series can get out of hand very quickly, as I’m learning. Above is the series bible I’m working on for my contemporary romance. Unlike for the single novel, the tabs do not denote parts of the Story Binder. Instead each tab is a different part of the series, from the prequel novella to the first book, and so on. I gave the major characters their own tab because the cast of these books gets out of hand easily.  They’re a roudy bunch of girls!

Under each novel tab, I have different pages for different parts of the novel, things that need too much information or that I want to be able to access quickly.  Because so much of the information in each book touches the entire series, most of the information is in the story binder tab.  If I’m writing book three, I need to remember that in book two one of the characters cut all her hair off and in the first book another character got vaneers.  For that reason, most of my individual book tabs contain story specific locations, the plot and supporting characters only.

So, that is a quick and dirty overview of how I use Lynn Viehl’s Novel Notebook in OneNote. Just because this is how I do it, doesn’t mean it’s the only way to go. If you prefer to use Word, you can add in bookmarks for where the different sections start, or have separate documents for the really big sections or major characters.

I used to use yWriter a lot, but I don’t anymore. If you use it, or think you would like to use it, there is some organizational capability built into the software. Now, as you can see by this screen shot, my information was all over the place and the organization was very lacking. I covered some big areas I thought were important, but I missed a ton of stuff I should have been working on. But, this Project Notes section could very easily hold your Novel Notebook with other sections or research.

If you’re using Scrivener, it also comes prebuilt with organizational tools. I’ve only used the Windows Beta version, so I’m sure there’s more, cooler stuff coming, but you can use that program to organize your Binder just as easily. You can create folders for different documents, research, pictures, or plot details. Scrivener has a very interesting feature where you can have two documents open in your project, so if you wanted to be writing and look at the physical description of your characters love interest, there you go! There are more organizational tools available in Scrivener, but I don’t use them. There was too much of a disconnect between what you wanted to past into the documents and what showed up. I found OneNote easier to work with.

Okay, that wraps it up as far as me talking about organizing your material. Find what meshes with your muse and work with it. If you need the hardcopy to flip through and touch – go for it! If you’re like me and an electronic binder works just as well, fantastic! Most importantly, go with what works. I’ve shown you what has been working for me as just one choice. Get the ball rolling and go!

I’ve discussed various tools I’ve used before.

My friend Suzan has blogs about using OneNote.

Thanks to Lynn Viehl for providing the Novel Notebook!

Do you have a way you organize your novel information?  What works for you?

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