Becoming an Author: Information Management
Remember that time when you were ten and late to school because you couldn’t find the math homework that you left in your messy room? I bet your mother’s nagging voice is still ringing in your head. “Well if you would organize your room, you wouldn’t have this problem.”
Turns out she was right (but we don’t need to tell her that).
Scenario - In the next scene of that crime novel you’ve been working on, your main character breaks into his ex-wife's home to hunt for a document that will prove his innocence. In his haste, he breaks a glass vase on the hard ceramic-tiled floor. Except, it wasn't tile. Or was it? Or did you even mention the floor in that brief paragraph you wrote about the ex's house ... some hundred pages ago?
Well, if you can manage to quell mom's voice for a second, I’ll share my experiences with you on how to avoid this.
One sure-fire method is to use a software program. When I first started writing, I purchased a program called StoryWeaver, one of the more inexpensive programs at the time.
For the price, it worked well. Keeping track of all the characters, places, things, and events involved nothing more than entering the data into a nicely formatted screen which could later be called up through different views.
There are also more expensive programs out there, such as Dramatica, that take your story creating process to a whole new level. But programs like this can be very cumbersome for what you're trying to produce.
My novel, Pinesport Divide, is a science fiction novel about two enhanced societies of humans. After defining the rules, terms, abilities, and other unique characteristics of these groups, it became abundantly clear to me that I would need a way to keep it all straight, so I turned to a tool that I could use from the get go. I realized that I thrive more in a less structured environment, so I traded in my “writing software” in for a quick, dirty, and free (kind of) tool that I use on a daily basis at my day job.
Microsoft Excel has become just as familiar to me as breathing, so naturally I had no trouble designing a spreadsheet to keep my thoughts organized. It was as simple as using separate tabs to collect information for my characters, places, things, and events. It’s not the prettiest method in the world, but it works as well as any other (for me).
What’s your method?
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