Things that helped my writing process.

Writing Everything Down

Not writing my ideas down was my biggest hurdle. They stay in my brain, floating around the chaos contained within my skull. I thought about my ideas often and at-length, developing them without ever writing any of it down.

I feel obligated to note that I’m not sure if what I do when I think about story ideas is maladaptive daydreaming or not. I haven’t exactly spoken to my therapist about it to get professional input, but the symptom list is…accurate.

When I started to write the ideas I came up with down, I did it in a chaotic manner that left my ideas for a single project scattered in a bunch of different places. At the point where I started trying to compile and organize those ideas, I got overwhelmed. A number of my projects fell ill to this struggle, and when my longest running story succumbed to it, I started trying to find ways to mend my broken process.

I’ve learned since then to keep everything in one or two places depending on the function, and branch out to other places if I needed supplemental tools.

The Sticky Note Outline

In the Spring 2019 semester, before my hiatus from higher education, I took an introductory screenplay writing course. The semester-long process was to ultimately write a full script, but the final grade was more about our overall outline and one filmed scene. I learned a lot that semester.

I struggled to outline the events of my play on paper. The more ideas I came up with, the more changes I needed to make to the order of events.

With my brain malfunctioning the way it does, I have a lot of sticky notes of various colors for general use on my desk. I took one look at the barren closet doors in my room, and I started slapping colorful pieces of paper with a short idea to the doors.

When it was time to take it down, I put all of the sticky notes on pieces of paper and inserted them into plastic page protectors. Making a booklet that you can rearrange smaller pieces of is a good alternative if a blank wall or set of accordion doors isn’t available, but I love to see everything laid out.

My sticky note outline revolutionized how I organized my ideas. I didn’t need to force myself into complying with something orderly and rigidly structured if it was composed in a fluid manner. Ideas change, and so does focus.

Discord

This is a weird one, but I’ve found Discord to be helpful in making sure I write my ideas down across platforms (computer and phone). In Discord, I have a personal server where I have created categories and channels to sort almost all of my ideas I’ve ever come up with in a way that is easy to navigate.

It also lets me share my creativity with my closest friends. Instead of taking three hours to explain a fraction of my stories to them, they have free reign to consume as much or as little of my ideas and funny characters. I do encourage them to mute my server, though, as I am most likely to post new ideas into it between 3:00am and 6:00am, and that’s when they like to head off to sleep.

Obsidian

Alternatively, Obsidian does a lot of similar things, using “vaults” for your ideas with different folders and note files, if you’re looking to keep your ideas top secret. The formatting of the text files is not something I enjoy for containing narrative works, but it is a helpful program to keep general notes or smaller sections of relevant information together.

It’s also free for personal use. They have add-on subscriptions and a one-time payment that gives you access to beta content, but the specific features I’ll be mentioning are entirely free. At some point when I have more funds, because I use the program so much, I will likely do the one-time early access payment to show my support.

I’ve reached a point where, for my active writing project, I only use Obsidian for one or two specific features, but the tools it has are useful for more than what I utilize them for.

When you have multiple files, you can link to other relevant files with additional notes or information. For instance, if you have a major world event, and there are certain creatures, characters, or locations in that event that are incredibly important, you can link the files for those. When you open Graph View, it will show a bunch of dots with their file titles, and anything that you have linked together will have connected lines. You can click and drag the dots around, which I find very amusing for my easily distracted brain, and the connections will remain.

My personal favorite—and somewhat abused—feature is the Canvas. When you create a canvas, you are given a grid-like space where you can create text boxes (called “cards”) that can be formed in any size or shape, link your notes within your vault, and even add images.

For my active idea, I had to create a calendar system, and I needed to plot all of the events of the story on that calendar. Using the canvas feature made this task much easier than how I was originally going to tackle it, and I can color-coordinate it, too. I’ve given a screenshot above of the way I have that calendar set up, and an additional cool feature that Obsidian gives is the ability to export it as an image with your text obscured for privacy. Neat!

I also mentioned that I most certainly take advantage of the canvas feature. If you are like me and go to add a few hundred text boxes to the grid, Obsidian will struggle to keep up with you. I will at another time divide my calendar from being multi-year into having each season on a separate canvas, but I am still impressed with the capabilities.

Microsoft Word

I know that a popular free alternative to Microsoft Word is Google Docs, but Docs has limitations, and more recently, it’s had a number of privacy concerns that have made me incredibly wary of using it for the ideas I am most serious about publishing. Docs will have a lot of the basic features found in Word, and for most writers, that’s all you really need.

The version of the Microsoft suite I use is the 2021 Home and Student. It’s a one-time payment of $150.00, and I was previously using the 2007 or 2010 version (I can’t remember which) before upgrading to 2021 this past year. The UI and new feature updates alone were worth the cost to me.

When I started compiling all of what I’d written from the Discord channels and my Obsidian vault (along with files I was taking out of my Google Drive), I shoved everything into what had at one point been the most disorganized document in the world. Some parts were written in full or half, others were loose scripts, and the rest was an amalgamation of one to four sentences that was just me jotting down an idea.

In Word, my favorite feature is the navigation pane. In the navigation pane, I can see all of my chapter titles. If I decide to change the order of events, if I think that one chapter is better suited to go after another, I can drag the chapter to wherever I want it to go in the navigation pane, and all of the contents under that heading will move with it. This is a feature Google Docs does not have, and I utilize it so often, I can’t imagine writing without it.

I have also been using MS Word to format my novel as I go at the size I plan to print it as. The A5 size is not a preset in the program, so I had to manually enter the dimensions. I bought some A5 paper with pre-punched holes and an appropriately sized binder to print some test pages. Printing the pages out and having something tangible helps me to maintain my motivation. Where I am torn between traditional publishing and self-publishing, I’ll have two different versions of the final manuscript if I finish the book.

Final Thoughts

I admittedly wrote a lot more than I intended to. I know I get frustrated when I am greeted with a wall of text (and ads) looking for simple answers, suggestions, or even cookie recipes, so I apologize if the whole post was overwhelming.

I hope that the ways I’ve found help me write might be able to help someone else. Each person has a process that suits them best when writing. My suggestions and habits are my own, and I never found any online resources to be helpful with the way my brain processes information.

I’ve tried a number of methods to learn how to outline, I’ve downloaded and bought printable resources to tackle other aspects of plot and characters, and I felt it was all a waste of time, money, and energy. Adhering to the methods of others has never been a strong suit of mine, especially when it comes to thinking the same way about things. I’m a very structured person, but I mentioned some of my difficulties with it in my last post on interpreting literature.

My methodology is still evolving, so if you have any suggestions for me, I welcome them in the comments.