Method & Madness

When you're writing, you want to feel free and creative; let loose to discover without restriction.
And it's good to have some systems in place to make it easier. I'm not talking about writing rules--that's a whole different subject--but organizational systems.

As the saying goes, "what gets measured, gets done." And while you can't measure creative content, or quality, or originality, you can certainly measure words, and that's what I do.

Here's my organization and tracking system for the novel.

1) I create a folder for the novel, of course, and sub-folders within it labeled Research, Correspondence, and Chapters, and Misc.

2) For each chapter, I create a separate a separate file, named thus: novel name - chapter 1. I don't keep every draft of every chapter, by the way. I just find it too cumbersome. However, if I excise a part that I think will fit elsewhere, or develop into another story, or which I simply like for one reason or another, I copy/paste that to a new file. I name it something, and save it in the Misc folder.

3) If I get input from other readers on that chapter, or if I do rewrites, I make the modifications in the individual chapter file.

4) At the end of the day, I save a copy of the chapter or chapters I've been working on, IN SEQUENCE, in a separate file that contains the entire manuscript of the book.  Its name is: novel name-complete.

5) Here's where the "what gets measured, gets done" notion comes into play. The last thing I do after a writing session is do a word count of the novel name-complete file.

6) I keep an Excel spreadsheet of my word count, which automatically calculates how many words I've written on a given day when I enter the starting point (where I ended the previous day, obviously) and the ending point.

When I started this with Secret Spy, I had written 34,000 words, and it was really great every day to watch my progress. I suppose if I were really clever I could turn the spread sheet into some groovy bar graphs or what have you, but of course that's not really the point. The point is to be able to watch your progress. My daily goal was 1,000 words, and except for one or two days I hit it, and perhaps 30 percent of the time I exceeded it. My top word count for a day was 3,677.

This system also plays into my rewriting strategy. Once your manuscript is complete, you have it in a single file. You know the beginning, the middle, and the end, and you also know your characters, themes, settings, and conflicts. I comb through the manuscript from the beginning to end, strengthening each component as I go along.