Staying organized in the thick of the plot!

I have written a few crazy-complicated plots in my time. Some of which made it past the "pen and ink" phase. The rest, I quietly took out back in the early hours of the morning before the sun came up. I gently and lovingly strangled them and buried them there. There's a hydrangea there now, growing on top of those dead ideas. Someday I might dig those decaying messes up and bring them back to life, but they are a mess for now. They are illegible, tangled, and incomprehensible piles of nonsense, and thinking about them embarrasses me. 

The problem wasn't that they were weak or unoriginal. It was that the writing was too complicated to sort out, rewrite, and polish. -cough, cough, cough- In other words, I was too lazy and didn't have the time or energy to fix them. I don't believe that a plot can be too complicated, only unorganized- look at Game of Thrones.  

One of the problems with writing, especially the more significant works, is that they need to be crafted in an organized way, from the point of inception all the way to the reader. More than anything, the reader needs to be engaged and understand your work for it to be successful. Organizing your work starts with the first draft.

Every few weeks, I like to give some advice. This particular piece of advice is something that works for me, it may not work for you, but I hope it does. This week I will be giving three tips about the organization of a composition. This post is mainly for people who write with pen and paper. 

However, if you are a "digital writer" (you only write on a computer), I have some advice that may help. If you need a way to put your thoughts together in a way that makes sense- try Scrivener! It's perfect for the writer who makes notes, describes characters, plot points, chapter headings, and even dust jackets. I have been using it for a long time now and will use it for my next novels' second and maybe third drafts. Although ultimately I like to use word for the final.

Now, back to people who like to "pen and ink" it. Most of my organization is done on paper. This set of tips is for the people who want to write first drafts by hand, then work them over until they are ready to be typed. So without further ado, here are my tips:

1. 
   Pick the right notebook. This is by far the biggest tip I can give to any aspiring writer. While carrying around that awesome-looking leather-bound journal (the one that totally makes you look like a wizard), you might find that it is highly inconvenient and annoying. I have a number of those things. They look nice but are hard to write in. They don't lay flat, the pages are uneven, and sometimes the paper is horrid. On the other hand, the generic spiral-bound notebooks, although they work, aren't personal, and pages come out very quickly after long periods of use. Personally, I am a big fan of Moleskine-style journals, and I use them in conjunction with smaller, thinner notebooks. The journal is for the story, and the notebook is for the annotations, notes, character descriptions, and plot points.
2. 
   Next, make sure that ideas are written down as they come to you and marked/annotated in the pages respectfully. Some of my best ideas were recorded on the fly. I made sure I knew exactly when to insert them too. I use footnotes, subtext, and labels to know exactly where to execute my notes in the coming drafts. To Kill Them Softly changed a lot in this way. I changed about six or seven of the chapters completely. I removed two and added about four. These notes are ideas that came to me when I was writing. They made the story better. But most were "after the fact" and had to be added in subsequent drafts. If I didn't have a way of recording them and cataloging them as they came to me, my work would have come out as strong as it did. 
3. Lastly, I use a highlighter for the solid and essential plot points, questions I ask myself as I write, and side notes that I may or may not use in the future. I number the pages of my rough draft and code them to the pages as I go through the writing. I find colors make it easier to find the critical points to be added in rewrites. Blue is moderately important, orange and yellow are important, but not as important as green. Green is money- literally, the color of money, million-dollar ideas.

I hope that these are useful to someone else out there, and as usual, I will be giving more tips on this subject out in the future. I will also be providing some of the brand names and styles of my favorite notebooks. I will also be reviewing some of my favorite brands of pens and art supplies.

Cheers, and keep on writing!