Organizing for writers

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.