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The hardest part of any project for me is getting my notes and captured thoughts into some sort of usable format. That’s one of the reasons why I like conputerized note-taking systems like Evernote so much – it organizes for me by creating notebooks and allowing me to tag each entry.

But Evernote is only one of many different tools out there for organizing your thoughts. Each tool offers one or more of several key strategies for organizing ideas, so I thought I’d start this last section in this series by outlining some of the main strategies or paradigms for getting your thoughts organized in a useable form.

Strategies for Organizing Ideas

There are several different ways to organize your notes and inspirations for later recall. The ultimate goal is to be able to pull up the ideas you recorded earlier, whenever you need them and with as little effort as possible. This means imposing some sort of order on your material that makes sense to you – unfortunately, there is no single set of “best practices” that’s going to work for everyone. Here are a handful of strategies that might work for you.

1. Chronological

The simplest way to organize ideas – or anything else that occurs at various moments over time – is chronologically. You can keep an index card in your pocket, record any thoughts that come to you over the course of the day, jot a date in the corner, and drop it into an index card file at the end of the day before starting a new card. Or you could keep an idea journal, putting ideas down from front to back. Or even keep a single word processor file and add each thought to the bottom as it occurs to you.

The drawback to this kind of organization is that you have to remember when an idea occurred to you in order to find it again. Which isn’t very useful unless you have a mind like a steel trap (as they say) and a memory that goes back with some precision over several years. On the flip side, flipping through your ideas can be an inspiring activity in and of itself, and working chronologically does have the benefit of allowing you to see your ideas progress over time.

2. Project-based

If you work a lot on discrete projects, you might keep a file or folder for each project and add each idea to the appropriate place as needed. For example, you might write each new thought on an index card and, upon returning to your desk, drop each card into its respective folder. Or you could start an EverNote notebook for each project and clip notes to that notebook. This has the benefit of keeping everything you need to work on a particular project at your fingertips when you need it most, and out of the way when you don’t. On the other hand, it doesn’t help with ideas that don’t clearly belong to an active or past project, nor with ideas that might be useful in more than one context.

3. Tagging

Tagging is the newest thing in taxonomy, and if you use any modern blogging software, photo sharing site, or social media service, you’ve run across it. With tagging, you can assign a set of descriptive keywords to an item, allowing you to find it by browsing through any of the tags associated with it. Tagging eliminates the need to place individual copies of a document in several different folders – the same document can be found through any of the tags you’ve given it.

Several applications use tagging, but for the most part, tagging hasn’t quite hit its stride yet. It’s still difficult, for instance, to tag files on your computer’s file system (though see below for one solution), and no adequate system of scanning files and automatically tagging them has been developed yet. On the other hand, if you stay on the ball, you can produce a very useful set of tags, assigning everything you produce to its relevant project(s) and a set of descriptive terms that you are likely to remember.

4. Freeform

With search technology becoming more and more robust, some people have foregone organizing their thoughts altogether, depending on the ability of tools like Google Desktop to find whatever they’re looking for quicker than they could themselves. There  are tools that bring this approach to note organization as well, allowing you to dump everything into one central repository and pull out of it what you need using search or visualization techniques. For example, personal wiki software allows you to keep notes and add links on the fly using special formats like CamelCase (phrases squished together with each word capitalized to distinguish it from the words before, as in “CamelCase”) – and some newer wikis will find links between entries automatically.

Some applications for organizing your thoughts while writing

askSam: askSam has been around for years, and is the original freeform database. You can dump just about anything into askSam – including imported documents – and organize it easily in ways that make sense to you. askSam will locate links between various pieces of text and help you find exactly what you’re looking for. And it’s designed to be easy to use for non-technical users. At $150 for the basic version and almost $400 for the Pro version, it’s not cheap, but so many writers swear by askSam that I had to include it here.

The Literary Machine: A free program that whose author calls it a “document compiler”, the Literary Machine is a strange beast that some writers rave about and others loathe with all their hearts. The general idea is that you can dump ideas in and then pull them up and string them together into a final document. It’s not particularly intuitive, so I might be missing great gobs of functionality hidden under the hood; if the LM’s oddness clicks with your own particular brain quirks, you might find it an amazing extension of your thought processes. Otherwise, like me, you’ll pr’y be baffled.

Liquid Story Binder/yWriter 4/Scrivener/Story Mill: These novel-writing apps allow you to organize your ideas by project, with character sheets, setting forms, images, sounds,notes, and all manner of other information. They also feature built-in document editing, so that you work in a wholly self-contained workspace with everything you need a mouse-click or two away. I’ve written about Liquid Story Binder and yWriter on this site; Scrivener and (Story Mill (formerly “Avenir”) are Mac-only and I haven’t used them, but many writers claim they are worth switching to Mac for! yWriter is free; the rest are all commercial software.

TiddlyWiki: TiddlyWiki is designed to be a personal wiki, allowing you to store, search link, and easily update your thoughts, notes, and ideas. The system is a self-contained web page that can open in any modern browser, from any storage medium (which means you can easily run it from a thumb drive, external hard drive, even an mp3 player if it will mount as an external drive on your system). TiddlyWiki is free and very customizable, with themes and plugins such as those at TiddlyTools.

Tag Everything (formerly “Files, Folders, and Tags”): Tag Everything allows you to add tags to files and folders directly in the Windows file system, which means you can easily associate one file with several different projects. It’s not free, but at $30 it’s not terribly expensive, either, and if taging “clicks” with how yur brain works, it’s the only way at the moment to bring tags to your Windows files.

Of course, there are hundreds of other tools that can help you organize your thoughts. I’ve tried here to mention a few of the more representative ones, but I’m interested to hear your thoughts – what software, if any, helps you get your thoughts organized when you write? How do you keep track of all the odd ideas that occur to you throughout the day – once they’re recorded, then what? Let me, and the other readers, know about your system in the comments!

Creating a Master Document isn’t all that hard, but it’s a little fiddly – you have to get the styles just right and you need to set everything up from the beginning for best results. Sebastien Berthet emailed me about his solution to the same problem, a program he created called Chapter by Chapter.

Chapter by Chapter is a free plugin companion (Update: Sebastian tells me that the program stands alone and therefore is not technically a “plugin”) for Word – it works with Word 1997 through Word 2007 – that allows you to pull together multiple documents into a single longer one. In addition, the program places an outline view in a pane to the left of your editing window, allowing you to jump back and forth between the various pieces of your manuscript with ease. When you’re done, Chapter by Chapter handles the task of compiling the documents.

Since Chapter by Chapter uses the built-in cut-and-paste function  to assemble the final document, it doesn’t have the same file and text corruption issues Master Documents users sometimes run into (although Word 2007 fixes a lot of those problems, too) – only the text and basic formatting is moved, not all the underlying options and style information that Word dumps into its files.

More importantly, while you need Word to do the work of outlining the document and assembling the pieces, once a document is associated with your project you can use any word processor to work on it (as long as you don’t change the file format). Which means you can transfer the document to a Palm or Windows Mobile device and edit it on the go, or stick it on a flash drive and work on it with whatever software a computer at the library, Internet cafe, or parent’s house has installed. When you come home, copy the revised document over the original, fire up Chapter by Chapter, and you’re good to go.

Ultimately, Chapter by Chapter just provides a more elegant interface than Words Master Documents and Document Map features. Sebastien has made a lot of effort to make Chapter by Chapter easy to use, and to make it work well with other tools writers might use (like SuperNoteCard). Especially if you’re using pre-2007 versions of Word, you should definitely look into Chapter by Chapter.

Chapter by Chapter (Free)

The Work In Progress Notebook contains the following major sections, with pages for details of each:

• Characters
• Setting
• Plot
• Polishing and Editing
• Sticky Notes
• Notes
• Submissions

Ruesch says the Work In Progress Notebook is modeled after her own tattered notebooks, and it’s clear that this is the product of a working writer’s experience — and not how a programmer or publisher might imagine a writer would work.

There are decent-sized images of many of the page templates, as well as a couple full sample pages to download, available on the site, so you can have a look and see if Ruesch’s model suits your own writing style. I really like that she’s made the WIP Notebook available as a download, since a) you can modify the templates easily in Word, and b) you can print off pages as needed.

Work In Progress Notebook ($14.50 paper/$6.95 download)

Spacejock Software has released a new version of their novel-writing software yWriter. Written by a writer for writers, yWriter is a great little tool for organizing novels in progress — and just about any other long manuscript.

yWriter allows you to create a book project, add chapters, scenes within chapters, and character profiles — assembling the manuscript from these pieces at the end. You can track locations, items, and viewpoints; set and keep track of daily word count goals; and import scenes from other programs saved in Rich Text Format (useful if you write on a Palm or other mobile platform, so you can add the work easily when you get home).

Best of all, yWriter is free (as are other Spacejock Software products, including several good ones for writers).

yWriter (Free)

To say that LSB is a novel-writing program hardly scratches the surface of what the program does. To be frank, the program does so much that I’m not even entirely sure what it does! Let’s start with the metaphor of a binder. In a pen-and-paper world, a writer might put together a binder with all the information they’d need about their book-in-progress: character sketches, plot outlines, setting notes, drawings, random thoughts, todo lists, and so on.

Once you get the ideas behind it, LSB essentially offers a digital version of the paper binder, integrated with a workspace where you actually write your novel.

Or your not-novel. While LSB is clearly designed with fiction writers in mind, it is easily adaptable to any sort of prose, from short essays to non-fiction monographs. Character forms can be used to store information about sources or historical figures, setting forms can be used for place descriptions, and so on. In fact, for the essayist or short story writer who may want to compile their work into a book down the line, LSB is ideal — each chapter (or essay or story) is stored as a separate file (in Rich Text Format, which can be opened by virtually any word processor on any system) so it can be manipulated on its own, but when it comes time to collating everything together, LSB automates the process completely.

LSB also includes some other nice features, like the ability to create playlists to use while writing (consider this: a “heroic music” playlist for action scenes, a “romantic idylls” playlist for romance scenes, and a playlist composed entirely of Prince songs for sex scenes — you can soundtrack your own book while you write!) and reference works like a dictionary and thesaurus.

LSB comes with an example “Book” (its jargon for everything related to a single project) that includes examples of every function and tutorials on how to get started (which are complemented by some nice tutorials on their site). I had originally planned to do a walkthrough of the book creation process, but Tom Colvin of Becoming a Writer Seriously has already written a good introduction to Liquid Story Binder that covers most of the ground I would have.

Though it has a pretty steep learning curve, which the tutorials go a long way but not all the way towards alleviating, LSB is a worthwhile investment for any writer. I’d suggest getting it at the start of a project, so you don’t have to deal with cutting-and-pasting existing material into LSB and can focus instead on working with the program’s workflow. At $45.95 US, LSB isn’t cheap, but it’s nowhere near as expensive as much of the lesser software out there that promises to make writing easy. LSB makes no such promise; it only aims to make writing more organized.

Liquid Story Binder XE ($45.95 US)

I try to do all my web writing for the week in two blocks of uninterrupted time. That way I can relax and focus on other things the rest of the week. In WordPress, you can schedule posts days, weeks, even months and years ahead of time, and they’ll go live automatically when that time comes.

If you’re getting ready to launch a new blog, do the same thing, only more so: write a month’s worth — or more — of content to launch with. Schedule two or three posts a week as far in advance as you can. Getting a new site off the ground can be challenging, and until you settle into a routine it can be hard to know how much time it will take. If you launch your site and something important comes up, it may sit with no content for days or weeks, doing nobody any good.

Making sure the first couple of months are well-stocked can take a lot of pressure off, allowing you to focus on building relationships with other bloggers, promoting your site, and of course doing the writing that is your life’s blood. My goal before launching this site was 100 posts “in the can” — more than half a year’s worth (at 3 posts per week). Of course, I can and do slot in new material in response to anything that happens in those first several months.

Another time to pre-write a lot is before a vacation or any other long time away from your site. Get two week’s worth of posts in the can before you take a week’s vacation — one week for the week you’re gone, and one week for the week you come back. That way, there’s no pressure to take up 100% of your daily life when you return from your vacation — and if, as often happens, you come back with Hungarian Death Flu or Angolan Sneezing Sickness, you’ll have time to recover without worrying about your site.