Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Author Blog Challenge : Outlining my projects

DAY 7 Prompt: Describe your outline process for your book. What do you do to stay organized?

How do I outline a project?  Honestly I go back to the basic research paper style outline only I tend to center it on a page so I can make a ton of notes in the margins. 

I know when I get a real serious writing bug I tend to online my characters' stories individually and then combine those outlines with abbreviates for the various characters. 
Staying organized in the writing process is hard for me, I use Post-it Flags to mark chapters, issues, and other spots along the way. For projects that have only been online (here on the blog especially) I tend to use the blog labels.) When I print a project I try to put at least a partial copy in my accordion file and save a digital copy to a4GB USB Flash Drive thumb drive as well as an external hard drivePortable Hard Drive , of course several of my projects are old enough they live on a 3 1/4 floppy (am I dating myself with that admission?)

I have learned a hard lesson, don't depend on any one system to stay organized or keep your writing safe. Print copies can be lost, hard drives can crash , online locations can be hacked, etc... So I tend to keep copies in multiple locations and formats to try and keep my projects safe as well as organized in some fashion.


1 comment:

Rhonda Parrish said...

You make some good points about how easy it is to lose our work, work we've poured so much time and energy into. These days I write my first drafts by hand and then transcribe them to the computer where I use Dropbox to keep up-to-date copies on each of my computers plus online. Still, perhaps I ought to follow your lead and toss them on usb drives too. Just in case.