Writers Anonymous : There are not enough cemeteries to hold all the dead characters I left behind by not finishing stories. "Old Graveyard" by Evgeni Dinev from FreeDigitalPhotos.net Every writer I know has a folder. What's IN this folder? Every note, every picture, every first line, every character sketch, every idea for a story you've ever had. I have one. It's quite large. It's called WRITING. Inside the folder, you will find other folders that represent various "states" of projects. I have a NOVELS folder that contains novels that are completed, novels with outlines, novels with ideas. I have a SHORT STORIES folder that contains the same elements as my NOVELS folder. I have a STORY IDEAS folder that is full to the brim of ideas. I even have a NEW STORY IDEAS folder because of course those ideas are different from the those in the STORY IDEAS folder. I have a SNIPPETS folder that contains hundreds of notes, each note has a line that I h...

Character profiles. Character pictures. Snippets of dialogue. Outlines. Images of houses, cars, etc. of book characters. Sketches of scenes. At some point, a writer has to take all of the “things” s/he has collected for a story and start organizing them in order to tell the story. As an organizer, I’m always looking for strategies, programs that help me visualize story components while I’m writing. For years, I’ve used One Note ; its notebook style helps me to see the project as a whole and to see it in chunks by chapters or by scenes while also allowing me to embed notes, images, videos, and web links. One Notes has helped me organize several of my novels and also academic papers, to include my dissertation that I’m currently researching and drafting notes for. One Note There may be, however, another program that will fight for my attention: Scrivener. It’s been around for a while for Mac users, but recently, I downloaded the Windows beta version of Scrivener ; the official v...