"Jotting things down" is now "Click and Drag"

Why post-it notes just don't get the job done anymore...writers need to explore digital organizational tools

 

Wikimedia Commons,https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ibrahim_Husain_Meraj

 

When you’re under pressure ORGANIZATION is the first thing to fray at the edges and come apart at the seams.

Our writing can reflect the chaos of our everyday life in strange ways. We forget to put quotation marks around something someone says, and it slips under the radar as our own words. We screw up a citation. We spell someone’s name wrong. We attribute something to Tom, when it was really Mary who said it.

Accidental plagiarism, like the oversights mentioned above, is very different than intentional plagiarism. However, your reputation as a writer will suffer nonetheless, as both employers/publishers and sources start to doubt your credibility and accountability.

Forget about organizing the junk drawer (as always, that can wait). Let’s just see if we can apply some get-it-together tips and technology to our writing, as suggested by some fellow writer-bloggers, so that egregious errors can be avoided.

Melissa Donovan’s blog Writing Forward features a post titled “Writing Tips for Getting and Staying Organized.” Donovan gives advice for keeping printed and digital writing material orderly, but focuses on shifting towards overall digital organization.

She recommends keeping everything writing-related in folders, while stressing the importance of subfolders that can be tailored to very specific fields.

Here are the subdirectories she has included within her “Writing” folder:

• Notes and Ideas: Notes on the craft of writing and random ideas that don’t fit anywhere else.
• Templates and worksheets: Blank character sketches or world-building worksheets as well as story-writing guides, like the Hero’s Journey.
• Completed Works: Pieces that are ready to be sent out or published.
• In Progress: anything that is not polished, with the following sub-folders:
• Fiction
• Poetry
• Non-fiction
• Scripts
• Journals and Freewrites: pretty self-explanatory.
• Feedback: feedback and critiques that I have given and received.
• Submissions: copies of work that I’ve submitted along with a spreadsheet for tracking submissions.
• Research for Writing Projects: information that I’ve found online and have saved because I think it might come in handy someday for one of my projects. Now that I use Evernote to clip material from the web, this folder has become an archive.

Donovan also recommends taking advantage of software and online tools. Since she began to use Evernote, her “Research for Writing Projects” subfolder is more of an “archive,” Donovan says.

Evernote is a note taking/capturing software capable of “web clipping” snippets of information from the internet for future reference, making the jotting down of lengthy URLs obsolete. Evernote also works effectively as a scanner, capturing hand-written notes or sketches. Evernote is synchronized across your digital devices, sharable, and has a text search feature. The basic version is free, allowing for 60 MBs uploaded per month, while other plans are available at cost. Check out the company’s blog for user tips and creative use examples.

Freelance writer and blogger Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen covers the topic in her Blossom blog post by guest writer Hope Hammond. Her suggestions focus on digital tools that help the writer keep things straight from idea conception to finished project.

For “mind-mapping” or what many of us might call “brain-storming” or even “bubble charts,” Hammond recommends the free software FreeMind. From essays to keeping track of projects, FreeMind is one-click responsive. This software seems like more of a one-page inclusive structure than a collection of notes like Evernote, as shown in this video tutorial:

 

A similar software program, Mindmanager, looks a bit more intuitive and updated to me. Their “virtual whiteboard” allows the addition of notes, hyperlinks and attachments for “all your information in a single view.” Markers allow for tracking of progress and due dates.

 

For those who prefer a more rigid outline to get ideas and sections of writing arranged better, WorkFlowy, whose company homepage touts that many other great digital giants and books relied heavily on this “notebook for lists” during creation. Interactive outlines with bullet points that can collapse, zoom into subheadings, be relocated or marked as complete are crisp, clear and oh-so linear. Hashtag filters can be used to skip to certain sections of the outline as well for quick navigation.

 

Anyone like the somewhat complex combination of outline and brainstorm that is a flowchart? Try Gliffy software. Drag-and-drop shapes and templates make “no expertise necessary,” and like Evernote, ease of sharing and collaboration is key. Gliffy is Google Drive integrated and Visio document compatible, depending on standard or business version. Both are less than $10.00 per month.

 

Digital tools can be immensely helpful for molding ideas, capturing interesting influences and inspirations while making their source INSTANTLY recognizable every time you view them, and grouping the actual structure of a piece of writing. Hopefully with these tools, you will be less likely to lose track of who said what when; entire “characters,” including the nonfiction kind, can be mapped out this way, so connections don’t get lost along the way.