Help me get a handle on this mass of writing!

October 19, 2009 8:07 PM

WriterFilter: I need help organizing this large, sprawling, and motley set of Word files into the first draft of a novel.

I've written about 450 pages of what I hope will be a novel. I'm one of those people who has little trouble getting words onto the page, but organization and revision can be really difficult for me, especially with a longer piece of writing.

Right now the novel-to-be consists of dozens and dozens of separate files, each containing multiple scenes, single scenes, or even fragments of scenes. I also want to weave newspaper reports, interviews, and letters (all of which I've written) into the narrative.

In my mind I have a pretty good grasp of the content and flow of the whole. It's the process of organizing the mass of writing that has me cowed. I feel like I'm looking at a huge skein of yarn that I have to untangle before I can make use of it. I can see the beginning and the end of it, but the middle is a mass of knots.

Can you recommend ideas/techniques/strategies/software/how-to books to help me stitch this thing together into a draft? If I can do that, I think I can then revise it from beginning to end (as many times as necessary).

Bonus: fear of failure and the knowledge that this is going to be somewhat of a slog is paralyzing me to an extent, so I could use some suggestions to help with those issues, too.

FWIW I'm a Mac user and own the text editor Scrivener, which I think is awesome, though I haven't yet used it that much.

Thanks in advance, hive mind.

posted by sister nunchaku of love and mercy to writing & language (14 comments total)

Can you recommend ideas/techniques/strategies/software/how-to books to help me stitch this thing together into a draft? If I can do that, I think I can then revise it from beginning to end (as many times as necessary).

As I've learned over the years through experiences learning about and studying authors, there's no one-size-fits-all solution to this. Finding your own way to deal with your draft material is an integral part of your writing process. It seems to be miserable no matter who you are, if that's any comfort.

Given the fact that you have so many separate files, all I can say is that if it were me, I'd print it all in hard copy, cut it with scissors into segments, stack it, and transcribe it, or at least use it as a cut-and-paste guide, to create a single master document.

There can be a real advantage in dealing with writing in a concrete form like that, particularly with longer pieces. Small cutout segments are swappable and moveable. You can lay it out so that you see everything at once. You can make substacks and regions, taking over a room as you sort. In fact, this process can even help you see where you have too much or too little material, and reveal issues where transitions are inadequate, and the like. And you can interleave notes and other material.

But there's no one right way. And frankly, I think word processing programs sometimes make this moving-chunks-around process of writing lengthy pieces much less intuitive and much too cumbersome. Word programs aren't really adapted to literary writers' needs - they're better for producing short linear documents and business stuff. I often find I'm wishing for nothing more than an updated version of Hypercard, that will allow greater ease of sorting and accommodate fragmentary pieces which are easy to reorder.

I am sure you will get some great suggestions from this thread, but just wanted to mention that this is a time-honored writer's struggle. I was once privileged to see some manuscripts of Herman Melville's - he scrawled out his manuscripts on fire from sheer genius, then handed them off to his wife and daughter, who transcribed them in a nice clean hand. THEN they would read them back to him, or he would read them, and they'd make marginal notes. THEN they would re-arrange by physically cuttying the pages apart and reorganizing them, restacking segment upon segment until they were sometimes 5 or 6 layers thick. And then his daughter would pin the stacks in place with straight pins to hold them in the right order while she made yet another final copy.

So this has never been easy, and I'm not that optimistic that modern technology can really get at the heart of this difficulty. The process is compositional and entirely intellectual, and no matter what editing approach I've used, I've always had to confront the basic nature of the enterprise: facing down the beast of chaos and wrestling it, by sheer dint of will, into a semblance of order.
posted by Miko at 8:26 PM on October 19 [2 favorites]

Given the fact that you have so many separate files, all I can say is that if it were me, I'd print it all in hard copy, cut it with scissors into segments, stack it, and transcribe it, or at least use it as a cut-and-paste guide, to create a single master document.

Hm, and as I printed the whole shebang out, I'd assign each printout a number and then give the filename the same number, so I didn't have to remember which content was in which file. Then once I had it all stacked I'd open a blank document, start cutting and pasting by beginning with the top item on the stack. If it was #6, I'd open file #6, and cut and paste. Or something like that. And so on.
posted by Miko at 8:29 PM on October 19

You could try the Shrunken Manuscript technique (great visual here) and sort things out by coding them visually.
posted by headspace at 8:33 PM on October 19 [1 favorite]

Index cards. One for each scene and one for each chapter break.

Write a sentence that describes the scene on each one. Use a big bulletin board and move them around until they seem like they're in the right order.

Import your Word docs into Scrivener (or copy paste, if it won't let you), and arrange the bits in the order that you've devised. Export it into one document, print it out, and read the whole thing. Does it work? Why? Why not?

Rinse. Repeat.
posted by ocherdraco at 8:34 PM on October 19

Yep, I agree with Miko. There's a section of Lamott's Bird by Bird where she describes doing that very thing with a manuscript.

I find I think a little differently when I have something on a computer vs something on a piece of paper, right in front of me. Perhaps that difference will help you in organizing your novel.

Good luck!
posted by sugarfish at 8:37 PM on October 19

The way I got my novel in order was by reading the whole thing over, putting it into a sequence I thought worked, throwing out stuff that didn't fit anywhere (and adding a couple of chapters that seemed called for), handing the whole shebang over to a bunch of people to read over and then used their feedback to figure out a stricter, more coherent structure (which again called for some throwing out of stuff and writing new chapters) before I submitted the novel to a publisher (who accepted it). All this took about 9 months.

My advice is take your time and don't worry about getting it just right on the first try.
posted by Kattullus at 9:20 PM on October 19

This linear thinking person just assumed that you wrote a novel start to finish, reread it, edited it and submitted it. That is why I work with numbers not words I guess.

But, having put together a 75 page paper in college, I agree with the printing it out and cutting it up to rearrange it theory.

Also consider, if you prefer to work on the word processor, to use colors for the text and background as a way to sort it out. All paragraphs with green text and yellow background go together, etc.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 9:30 PM on October 19 [1 favorite]

FWIW I'm a Mac user and own the text editor Scrivener, which I think is awesome, though I haven't yet used it that much.

Huh? Scrivener's your solution.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 9:35 PM on October 19

When I saw your question my first thought was to recommend Scrivener, but I see you're already on top of that. Here's one way of going at it (echoing what others have said above but tailored to Scrivener). Import all your Word files into Scrivener. Split the files that contain multiple scenes down further so that you've got each scene on its own. Import all the other bits that you want to include into your project as well (letters, newspaper reports, etc.). Now you've broken your project down into its atoms. Make sure each atom has a one-sentence summary (Scrivener allows you to do this with the Inspector).

At this stage you can basically go crazy. Scrivener's Corkboard and Outliner modes let you color code and categorize in whatever way you want (e.g. if you wanted to mark the POV of the different scenes). If you like dragging index cards around, use the Corkboard mode; if you prefer a hierarchical view, use the Outliner. This is where having accurate summaries of each scene will help you see the grander structure of your project as you're moving things around. Dragging whole scenes around as units with such ease frees you (at least it does me) to experiment a bit with the flow of your work.

As people noted above, this will definitely be an iterative process. Do it once to the best of your ability. Just barrel through and try to maintain as distant a perspective as you can manage. This means that you should try not to muck around with your prose at this stage. (This is where working only with the summaries of the scenes helps, since you're working with the gist of the scene and not the details of its execution). Read it through in the order you've chosen, making notes where the transitions are awkward or simply don't work. Go back and move things around. Keep doing this until you've got an order and flow.

I agree that most word processing software, but I think Scrivener's brilliant at this sort of thing (and isn't really word processing software). It helps you really find and maintain the backbone of your project. I'd at least give it a try for this project before resorting to the analog alternatives.
posted by lettersoflead at 10:00 PM on October 19 [1 favorite]

Go with what lettersoflead says. It's a great process.
posted by Brainy at 10:03 PM on October 19

Thank you for the awesome input so far. I don't expect the process to be easy, nor that technology will solve it completely. It's reassuring to think that the difficulties are time-honored and have no single solution. The idea that overcoming them will be hard and require perseverance (and an iron butt) is actually quite comforting.

Scrivener does seem to be the tool of choice, which is why I mentioned it in my question. Good to have that corroborated as well. It's super helpful, too, that people are mentioning specific features that may serve me here.

sugarfish, I remember that anecdote in Bird By Bird. But I also recall that the results were not very good in that particular instance! I'm sure such a process can work well, though, depending on the individual case.

Thanks again, everybody, for your time and ideas. *off to buy a better printer*
posted by sister nunchaku of love and mercy at 12:43 AM on October 20

the results were not very good in that particular instance!

They weren't? I know it was stressful for her, but...she has a bunch of published bestselling books.

Just goes to show what I wanted to say - this process is rarely pretty!
posted by Miko at 7:28 AM on October 20

> the results were not very good in that particular instance!

They weren't? I know it was stressful for her, but...she has a bunch of published bestselling books.

Just goes to show what I wanted to say - this process is rarely pretty!

Well, she did wind up with a completed draft, so I suppose she was successful in that sense, which is really what we are talking about here. But her editor told her the novel was no good. (Ouch.) I don't know if it was published eventually. Happily for her it was not her first novel!
posted by sister nunchaku of love and mercy at 9:47 AM on October 20

I think she had the conversation with the editor first. Then she snorted some coke and laid everything out on the floor.

I don't recommend the coke, though.
posted by sugarfish at 10:12 PM on October 20