Hi, my
name is Dannie, and I’m addicted to office supplies.
Color-coded
subject dividers, index cards, sharpies, post-it notes, three-ring binders,
page slicks, push pins, and really fantastic pens which I will horde and
protect to the point of maiming.
No
for real. Don’ friggin steal my pens. I will cut you.
Beyond
my slightly compulsive love for Staples, once I started plotting I discovered I
needed a way to keep all my crap in order so I could quickly reference it while
I draft. All this stuff about character motivation, story structure,
brainstorming, and so on needed a home. A couple months ago I touched on some
of this during the
Writing Process Blog Hop.
You
may have heard of this referred to as a story manual, book
bible, etc. I call it ‘The Binder’ as in “Hubs, your cat just threw up on
The Binder and now he needs to consider himself an endangered species.” For 30
days during NaNoWriMo, I carry The Binder pretty much everywhere I go like a
security blanket knitted from binder clips, printer ink, and those little
cheerios-looking sticker thingies you put around a punched hole when your paper
rips.
Some
people do this electronically. It’s a lot more tree-friendly and with apps like
Evernote and Scrivener, there are easy ways to keep all your writer e-stuff in
one place while also keeping it portable. I prefer something a bit more tactile,
particularly while I’m brainstorming (I prefer brainstorming better by hand. No
idea why.)
Either
way, if you’re going to plot, you’ll probably want an easy way to find your
notes as you’re writing. Thanks to The Binder, if I need to remember a certain
type of vegetation present in a desert as opposed to a mountain, I just flip to
the Settings tab (purple this year, if anyone’s curious.) And I don’t get
distracted by the internet, Pinterest, etc when I’ve got my hard-copy binder to
eliminate that temptation.
Today’s Links:
How
do you organize your writing life?
I enjoyed readding your post
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