This August I have been trying to compile all the writing I have done for my novels over the past couple of years. What I thought was going to be simply a matter of copying and pasting has turned into a whole scavenger hunt for my work. In order to access it whenever I want, I have kept most of my writing on Google Docs. But I am also a teacher and grad student, so there is a sea of graduate assignments and student work I have to sift through.

To make matters worse, the months I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) have left me with 60+ page documents where I have jumped around from novel idea to novel idea to keep me writing in order to hit that 50,000 word count goal. In order to find specific scenes, I have been having to read through everything to determine what to keep and what to move to the recycle bin.

So far, I still have not found a 30 page rewrite that I loved compared to the crappy first draft I had before, and I would have started to believe that I just made it up in my head if it weren’t for the fact my husband remembers me reading it to him. At this point… I think it may be lost to time. But watch it show up as soon as I finish rewriting it.

There’s a lesson here, I think. But I am not quite sure what it is. For one thing, I will definitely not have so many different documents scattered across different computers and platforms for one single book. Another realization I had in all this was from seeing just how much nonsense I write during NaNoWriMo just to get my word count in. Trying to reach that word count might be more of a hindrance than a benefit to me at this point in my writing journey.

More than anything, this scavenger hunt experience has shown me that I need to get more organized. Just because I have a method to my chaos that most people acknowledge as being organized, it becomes a real problem when enough time has past and my memory of where exactly things are starts to fade away. Because of this, before I start to make any significant progress with my writing, my goal this August (and possibly into September) is to fully organize my writing and the system I used to keep track of everything.

So, here’s the plan: I will just have two files for each novel, one for the manuscript itself and the other for the copious amount of notes that I will label and color code, so even though I will still have to search for things, it will all be in one spot. Then, for all the random story ideas and scenes I have written that have not yet congealed into a novel or even short story idea, I will have a folder to compile each of the snippets in their own separate file. Hopefully, that will put me in a better spot, and as always, I will carry around a notebook to jot down any ideas I have while not near a computer.

Being able to write well and in copious amounts is all well and good, but not having a clear way to organize these writings will just leave you with piles of half-baked ideas, either physically or digitally. In order to be a successful novelist, I have to develop an organized system for my writing, and I hope to have just that with this new plan. Wish me luck!