They say there are two types of writers: those who outline and those that don’t. But aside from outlines, writing a novel can produce an enormous amount of material that needs to be organized. What kind of writer are you? Floating along happily lost in the creative process, your words flowing out in a continuous stream of creativity? Or are you looking at the novel in front of you wondering how to bring it all together?
As they always say, whatever works for you, keep doing it. I stumbled into my first novel. I started with short stories like everybody else, but mine were always too long, trying to deal with too much. So I thought I might as well go for a novel. But where do you start? I didn’t have the great Canadian novel inside me, waiting to burst forth in fiery prose. I was literally stumbling from one sign-post to the next.
I had the holy grail of writing practice books, Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. If you haven’t read her you must. One of the foremost teachers in “keep that pen moving on the page” writing practice. But no matter what advice I’ve read, there’s a similar theme, you have to write a lot of bad stuff to get to the good stuff.
So there I have Natalie Goldberg’s advice, write by hand in your notebook, don’t stop, keep channeling the story. At the same time I was working with writing prompts. One being, open the dictionary blind and pick a word, write from there. I picked the word “such”. My novel started, Such is the way of the world. That sentence is long gone now.
I started with “such” and wrote my first novel by hand, but not without some guidance, and an outline. I’m the outliner type. And I bought a book (well, I bought a few) but my guiding text was, The Weekend Novelist, by Ray and Norris. How to write a novel in 52 weeks. One year. My “year” became biblical in proportion as it would take me at least another ten years (I stopped counting after that) to finish. I also live by the axiom, Writing is editing. And I had so much editing to do.
(A little forgiveness here. I got married, had 2 kids, moved to the country, worked and volunteered in all this time. But I kept persevering, kept going to novel groups, writing groups and taking workshops. Now I’m in the trying to get it published phase.)
But how best to organize all this material? I had transposed my written draft into Microsoft Word which is where I did all my editing. Now Word is a great word-processor, but not a great novel organizer. I worked to split my novel into chapters where I could find things easily, but often spent half my time trying to figure out how best to do that. I bought two large whiteboards so I could see at a glance where I was in the story: What 
had just happened and what was going to happen. I had binders and a large notebook with hand-written character notes, sketches of locations, plot development. And I had a well-thumbed paper outline. And index cards, don’t forget the index cards.
Now I’m writing my second novel. I’ve taken some time for character development, plot points, story line, themes, sub-plot. And I’ve started to write again. But this time, it’s all different. I’ve gone through the pain-staking phase of learning how to write a sentence, how to lay out a scene, how to build suspense. I won’t say I’m a master, but I’m much further along then I was.
And I have a great new tool. I have Scrivener. I’m still in the first draft phase of my writing, but so far, it’s a thing of beauty. It has index cards built in, word-processing for getting the words out, and an easy to see outline as you’re going along. You can colour code your index cards for point of view, indicate what stage the scene is at, first draft, final, to do. And the best thing ever is you can grab a scene, an index card, and just move it, plop, there it goes somewhere else in your story, and you can see where it is.
There’s a place for character notes you can look up quickly, place descriptions, and research including multimedia. Everything at your fingertips, in one place, on one screen. It’s an organizer’s dream! I still have a binder, and I still work up bits in a notebook dedicated to the novel. But I’ve transcribed my notes into Scrivener and probably won’t look back now.
I’m typing the novel this time. The first draft won’t be hand-written, it’s just so much easier to type and I can go for longer. And now my writing is truly portable. I could go anywhere with this and have everything I need in one place, my laptop. I don’t always like being tied to something electronic. I prefer the basic ease of pen and paper, no technical difficulties, no glowing screen. But using Scrivener beats anything pen and paper has to offer. It is your novel at a glance, and it’s your novel, every word of it, just waiting to be compiled.
You can get a trial copy for 30 days of ACTUAL use (how cool is that) https://www.literatureandlatte.com/trial.php, and if you’re convinced it’s the organizing tool for you, it’s a reasonably priced program to purchase. Do the tutorial so you get a handle on all the nifty features. Or check out their webinars. You have nothing to lose. Now, back to novel writing!
