Overcoming Organizational Problems for the Writer

This is part 2a of a 5 part series on Challenges to Daily Writing and How to Beat Them.

Writers encounter organizational problems on a few different levels in approaching the daily habit:
1)The organization of the work itself and the tasks that lie within it.
2)The physical organization of the workspace.
3)The organization of life in order to accommodate the writing.

This last (#3) I addressed in last week’s blog on the Time Challenge. This week, I will tackle the first of the other two organizational challenges: the work itself.

Organization has little place in the writing of your first draft. If you are like me, and you crave some kind of order, or cling to it like a rope bridge over an enormous canyon you are forced to cross with no real idea of what lies on the other side (another way to think of creating a first draft), then you do that ahead of time. You outline, plot and plan.

Then you plunge, discover and divine.

Or you do it the other way around.

Either way, you’ll have a dialectic between Dionysian creativity and Euonomic ordering. If you love order, you’ll have times when you have to abandon it. If you resist order, you’ll have times when you are forced to embrace it. As with all things creative, the key is to support your strengths and your weaknesses, rather than resist them.

I’ve found that my students want concrete descriptions of the stages of writing. All right. But again, this is my way, flawed and wildly specific, and the way you must find is your own. This is why we read writers on writing—not for exact answers so much as for inspiration and permission to be ourselves fully and to support ourselves in ways that make what we do work for us.

That said, here are the stages of writing that you may want to visit daily or may visit over the course of a year or years as you labor on a long project:

1) Generate Inspiration and Ideas:

The most important organization tool you require here is capture. You think that brilliant idea is unforgettable—that is the sign of its brilliance, that particular glow—and then it’s gone. Vanished. So you must write down those fleeting thoughts, which means that you must value them. Most of them will come to nothing, and so you must value the flood of them, the whimsy, the generosity, the quirkiness of our imaginations, memories and brains. Without judgment. Just capture it.

The other important organizational tool here is spaciousness. You need time and space to generate inspiration and ideas. You need playfulness. A large blank notebook or piece of paper. A recording device and a long, empty path up a mountain. Your laptop open to a blank document and an old film with the sound turned off. And more of that non-judgmental permission. Just to see what is there, in the caverns of your mind and heart, without knowing what’s of value, what will grow. Not knowing is a state of grace (said someone).

2) Sift and Choose:
You have to go back and look at what you’ve done. This is the hardest one for me. I am easily bored of my own random creations and alternately horrified by them. To capture my own attention, I require a plan. You, on the other hand, may be blessed with that passionate love for your old words on the page, that delight—you can’t even believe you wrote this (my favorite) or just a simple joy in what you did. For your sake, I hope you are one of these open-hearted writers. But you can fake it.

Some good ways to approach your work:
i. Read it aloud, to yourself, to a tape recorder or to a benevolent listener if you are lucky enough to have one of those.
ii. Read it imagining you are someone else.
iii. Take off the right amount of time—enough that it is fresh for you but not so much that you have moved too far on to be interested in going back.
iv. Ordering what you choose. You must find a way to get the pieces that you like or want to work with into some kind of groupings. Here are a few key ways to do that:
a. By theme (These are all “about” the same thing.)
b. Chronologically (This happened and then this happened and so builds the story.)
c. According to a plan (Pre-fabricating a plan, often entirely artificially, can get you started.)

A few important logistics: Gathering these scraps and scenes can be done in a physical, real-world way, by printing them, stapling them into small groupings and spreading them on a large table or the floor, and then stacking them in the order you create. Or it can be done on a computer, in a program such as Scrivener, where you can basically do the same thing described above but on a virtual corkboard. Do what appeals most to you and what you are least likely to put off.

3) Commit to what you’ve chosen and labor over it. The organizational tools you’ll want at this point include:
i. Readers who can reflect back to you what you are doing and if and how it works or does not work.
ii. An ever-evolving clarity of vision against which to match the manuscript itself. Here you may require maps, journaling, lists, conversation, classes. You know what works for you in general—apply it to writing. If you don’t know, experiment and attend to the results.
iii. More reading aloud. More time off. A passion for the individual words that does not distract you from your passion for the story as a whole.
iv. Divide and conquer: You may want to focus on one aspect or element in each “pass” through the manuscript. A pass where you look at verbs; a pass where you follow a particular character; a pass where you look at causality and build; and so on.

4) Release it into the world. This is challenging, too. It requires an entirely different skill set than the one that got you here in the first place. Your introverted, reader self, the one in love with the silent force of language on the page, must rear her head and gaze into the bright lights around you. Blink. Blink. Those lights are not as harsh as they seem, if you can understand below your skin that rejection is just people saying, I’m not what you are looking for (when they may phrase it as, you are not what I am looking for).

You will need: Lists of submission opportunities (Writers’ Market; Poets & Writers, CROPPS list, etc.); solidly spell-checked and formatted mss ready to go; leather skin and incredible persistence. Then go, go, go. Keep going. Move on to step 5 but keep going with step 4. It’s a numbers game. Ask your favorite writes whose books you could not live without. Keep going . . .

5) Begin again. What? Are you crazy? You know those people who have their final child or children when their first batch are all grown up? Who return to diapers and temper tantrums just when they might instead be golfing or going out to eat? That’s the writer’s life. You spend more time than you thought possible, and more energy that you thought you had, nurturing one holy and hellish book . . . and then you start over again. Back to ideas and inspiration. Spaciousness and that ever-loving journal. Remember? Oh, and there’s only one thing you feel more than dread, and that is the thrilling urge to begin!

Does this resonate with your process? What organizational problems beset you when you approach the work? What can you learn about how you already do things that you can apply to your writing? I’d love to hear your thoughts on organizing the work itself.