This isn’t about organizing the words in a particular piece
of work. This is about organizing
and de-cluttering all the different bits of writing you’ve written and kept
throughout your life.
If you are a writer, you will have lots of document files on
your computer and lots of papers of work in progress, and probably copies of
publications that your work appeared in.
How do you organize all of it?
Today I went through my old papers. Having a distance of a number of years
(more than a decade, to be precise) was necessary for me to truly see how
stupid some of my writing truly was.
I had poetry from the time that I considered myself a “gifted”
poetess. (This was before I actually
took my first poetry class.) I
look back on that pre-class poetry now and cringe. There were just a few lines here and
there that were actually any good.
I even had the text of a musical that I had been writing,
based upon one of my favorite Book of Mormon stories. The rhymes were horrendous, the meter was awful, I had
mucked about with the story just for the sake of getting the rhymes right, and
it was in nearly every way, total blather. While my heart gave a pang at the memory of the long
hours I spent writing all those pages, I still knew without a doubt that I would
be completely and totally embarrassed if any real lyricist (or anyone else, for
that matter) happened to read it.
So I had no problem with dumping it in the recycling bin.
I had satirical essays I had written for fun during the time
I was in high school. That was the
time I was testing my rhetorical powers, discovering the fun of verbosity,
applying a sense of the incongruous to just about everything I could find that
seemed to deserve a sly dig.
Some of them were still good, but most suffered from in-jokes that were
too specific to be appreciated by a wider audience, too many digressions (since
that was a big form of humor for me then), and silliness that
really…wasn’t…funny.
The further back you start de-cluttering your writing, the
easier it will be to separate the wheat from the chaff. Don’t be afraid to trash
(recycle) the stuff that makes you shudder at its lack of finesse.
Some types of writing are going to be useful as parts of
family history. Well-written personal
essays give a slice of life that family (at the very least) will enjoy far into
the future. Even if they aren’t
marketable for any other outlet, they should be gathered and put in order by
date. Children and family
generations in the future will appreciate it. Trust me, they will.
Some bits of writing are just for fun. They are exploratory in nature, or they
are just a vent for high spirits.
They don’t seem good enough to offer to a publisher, but they are too
good to not share. For these, a
personal blog is a good medium.
The blog may be password protected, or, depending on your comfort with
public exposure, may be public. I
find a blog a good medium for sharing things that I don’t want to forget I
wrote but which I don’t want to store anymore on my computer or in my home. The prospect of putting a piece of
writing out in public is also a pretty good way to determine how much you
really care about that writing.
If you can’t bear for anyone
else to read it (and if you can’t bear to read it completely through), then it
should probably be completely trashed, both hard copies and soft copies.
If much of your work is on your computer rather than in hard
copy, organization becomes easier because you only have to worry about the
total file size and hard drive space is hardly a problem any more. (Just remember, back up, back up, back up!!!)
However, the main thing you need to do is to keep working files for each
piece of writing together and near the file they support. If you write often about a few topics
of expertise, it may be helpful to make a larger file to contain each of those
bodies of work.
It is helpful to have a folder or folders for your works in
progress. That way you know where
to go to find what you are working on.
When you’re done, move it to another folder for works completed.
Every once in a while, it is good to go through the “works
in progress” folder and remove the “stillborn” ideas. Stillborn ideas are the ones that you realize later are
problematic and really should be discarded. If it makes you feel better, move them to a “discarded”
folder so they don’t clutter your “works in progress” folder. Every once in a while, you might go
through your “discarded” folder and find an idea that you can actually do
something with after all. That’s
kind of fun. Of course, if you
just plain delete it, that’s just fine too. You may think of it again later in a form you can actually
use.
What do you do with the copies of publications that your
work has appeared in? If it is
just a few --you’re just getting off the ground as a writer—keeping them isn’t
a problem. But the more they
accumulate, the more space they take up, and that’s when you have to figure out
a solution.
The best thing to do would be to keep copies of the
publications that were the hardest to get into, the ones that were a true
victory for you. Those mean the
most. The others you don’t need
nearly as much.
What you do need,
however, is to keep a nice healthy list of all the publications and issues
you’ve been published in. This
list comes in handy for writing little autobiographical blurbs because you can
pick and choose the most impressive publications. A list of publications in date order is useful for showing
your growth as a writer. A list of
publications grouped by magazine is good for helping you keep an accurate tally
on your personal webpage or a curriculum vita of how many times you’ve been
featured “10 times in Vogue,” for instance. A list of publications by topic is useful as a portfolio of
work when pitching to a book publisher in an area of your expertise.
Organizing your files will make it so that you can spend
more time writing, and less time searching for your latest project or any other
works that you want to reread.
