Organizing Sections in Writing

Early on in my writing, I had the notion that I had to write in the order that it would appear in the book. Therefor, if I was thinking about how section C would work and had some great ideas, I wouldn’t write them down until I could get sections A and B down. I think this is a problem with many early writers and at some point, like other writers, I realized that it is better for me to sit down and write down what I’m thinking when I’m thinking about it than it is to put it off.

The problem though with writing out of order is that the story becomes a jumbled mess. Currently, I have the whole thing in a single word document. If you read it, it is hazardous to your mental health. Because of how I started writing, it works fine…. section A goes to section B and then on to section C. This is about where you run into issues because section C turns into section J which turns into section Z and then back to section E. The more I write, the worse this will get. And the worse this gets, the harder it will be later on to actually piece these sections together to make a cohesive story that someone may actually want to read.

Last night, while going to sleep, I started to realize this and began to think of a better way to organize the sections of my novel. There are a few possilbe solutions that I came up with but none of them seem perfect. The fist is that I continue in Microsoft Word, in a single document, but then putting headers at the start of each section to tell me what it is generally about, and then creating a table of contents at the beginning of the document so that I can get back to it easily.

The second option is to start using Microsoft OneNote. I have the latest version of Office Student, which comes with OneNote. I personally love this program for organizing thoughts, or more specifically just jotting down random thoughts so that I can keep track of them later. The interface has sadly not been updated like the rest of the Office suite, but it worked well enough before that I still love it. The downside here is that the formatting isn’t great and it would take a little more work to convert it back to Word when I am trying to finish up the book.

On a sidenote is my use of Office. The reason I bring this up is that lately I have been wanting to also have the ability to add to my book on breaks at work. Originally, I just wanted to bring my laptop to work, but my work is hugely sensitive on people possibly stealing personal info, so I don’t think that will work. However, if I had all my novel on Google Docs, this would allow me to be able to go in and write a few hundred words every day without having to sacrifice any home game time. The nice thing here is that Docs is pretty decent in its own right and while there would be added work in bringing it back to Word for finishing touches, I don’t think it would be quite as bad as going from OneNote to Word. Docs also has a table of contents feature much like word so that I could do that to organize my writing.

On the other side, lately I’ve been using break time to create and edit a wiki that I have built so that I can have a central database of my online RPG that is easy to navigate and find information that also could be viewed by other people if that need ever arises. I think at the very least, I will hold off making any final moves until after Christmas Break. It seems kind of silly right now considering I only really work for a day and a half in the next couple of weeks.