September 6, 2011

Change of Plans

I'm always trying to find better ways to keep organized, especially if it comes to my writing. A while ago, I did a post on the way I do outlines. Shown here:

You can see these because they've changed....a lot.

There is a lot going on in this WORD document, which I was completely fine with until I started planning out my story board. Comments are great, but without being able to make each comment a different color, I was getting confused on what needed to be worked on and which scenes were important to the story. 

Now, I've discovered Platonium!

Not really, but you'll see what I mean with this picture:


Sorry - had to black out my scene descriptions since this is a WIP :(

By using Excel, I was able to include a lot more information in my outline than in Word. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE WORD. I use it for everything, but when it comes to organizing my writing, I'm converting to Excel.

In this spreadsheet I've listed:

1. Chapter #
2. Status of chapter (Revision 1 = First round of major revisions, Revision 2, etc)
3. Pages of chapter
4. Word count in chapter
5. Scene number within chapter
6. Scene description
7. A column asking how the scene moves the plot forward (haven't filled that in yet)
8. Timeline (what day of the week the scene takes place on)

And then some color coding. The colors are where my story board takes hold. Blue is set up for the main plot turning points. Red for subplot turning points and yellow for those scenes that I need to clear up a timeline for. There seems to be A LOT of stuff happening in one day and I don't think it would be believable. There's only so much one person can handle.

What do you think? Do you utilize technology for your notes and outlines or are you old school? What are some ways you keep your information organized?

1 comment:

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