Category: Organization & Process

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Idea Organization

Idea Organization

Posted on by R.M. Archer

I have lots and lots and lots of ideas for stories. My brain is teeming with them. I have way more than I know what to do with. (Enough so that I might start a blog series giving them away so that they’ll get used.) So how do I organize them all?

New ideas always go into whatever writing notebook I’m currently using, or possibly my little blue ideas notebook that has been left alone for far too long in favor of my main notebooks. Poor thing. An example of a section of one of those pages looks like this:

It has any story ideas on it that come to mind, be they short snippets of scenes, dialogue, description, or names. Then at some point later I transfer them to a document I’ve titled “Writing Adoptables,” which is split into sections.

The first section is characters, and it has whatever facts about a character I have swirling in my brain and don’t plan on using in a current project. That section looks like this:

Any ideas I use in any of these sections will be formatted with strike-through.

The next section is settings, and as you can see in the picture below I do quite a bit with it:

Not. For some reason settings don’t pop into my head as readily as other things.

After that is titles, which I have a lot of, most of which came from title generators that I was using to come up with a title for a specific book and these didn’t fit but I liked them at the time and saved them. And then there are others that I came up with myself, one of which is blacked out because I like it enough to protect it (not that I expect any of you to take any of these):

I actually started Skandain’s Pride and then decided I didn’t like it much, so it’s still on here.

The fourth section is random lines. These can be lines of dialogue, lines of description, lines of narration, anything so long as it’s only a line or two long.

Section five is plot ideas, followed by various ideas that don’t fit in any specific category:

As you can see, plots aren’t something that tend to pop into my head unbidden, either.

The next section is names, and these are rather plentiful. The majority of them are fantasy names, since I find those the coolest, and this list (though not the visible section) includes a place name or two, as well:

After that comes a list of stories that I started or that I had cool ideas for and were too long for me to copy:

Some of them got so far as to even earn Pinterest boards before I lost interest or set them aside in favor of something else.

The last section is scenes and paragraphs, and it’s the longest section, partially because there are a lot of them and mostly because they’re just longer:

This is just the very small sliver that fit before the bottom of the page, and even the second one is a lot longer than it shows here. It’s 10 paragraphs long, actually, mostly dialogue. (I write a lot of dialogue. It’s something I’m working on balancing out.)

So that’s how I organize my ideas. Do you organize your ideas similarly or is your process entirely different?

With your ideas all organized, are you wondering how to pick the next one to use for a project? Sign up to the newsletter to get access to a couple of idea ranking worksheets!

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My Experience with Collaboration

My Experience with Collaboration

Posted on by R.M. Archer

I’m currently working on a couple of writing projects that I’m co-writing with my best friend, who goes by the screen name Allegra. These two stories we’re working on are vastly different, one being a futuristic sci-fi and the other being a fantasy set in Wonderland, and they’ve each presented their own challenges and joys, which I’ll try to go over a bit in this post.

The first story we started working on together is a sci-fi called Unstoppable. It’s the first of four books, and it follows a group of twelve escaped test subjects who have been genetically modified to have superpowers.

With this one our main problem is keeping the story going. We’re both kind of hazy on how the plot should go, so we plan on putting together an outline before we continue, or least part of one.

Allegra’s favorite thing about this story is getting to see through her MC’s eyes. Each of us has a character we write the POV of, and hers – Dagmar – is a very harsh, angry character, and she likes getting into a head so different from her own.

I’m not super in love with any part of the story, to be entirely honest, but if I had to choose a favorite thing it would probably be my POV character Raegyn or the character Trey who ends up being her boyfriend at some point. Actually, I think I probably like the overreaching, evil government the best, or Dagmar, because they’re probably the most developed parts of the story. I think Unstoppable needs some more work.

The other story we’re writing is currently just called Wonderland, since we have yet to come up with a better title. It’s also part of a series, called The Looking Glass Chronicles. It follows eight MCs as they hunt for relics from each of eight significant characters in Wonderland, who are dying and need to be replaced. The MCs are there to replace them.

There isn’t really a main problem with this one at this point, but to begin with we really butted heads on a few things because we’re both really stubborn and we saw a couple of the characters different ways and wanted to write the same characters. It was kind of a mess, but we got it sorted out.

Allegra and I both really, really like this one, so lowering down to one favorite is practically impossible. She said she likes how the two POV MCs – Chess (mine) and Hattie (hers) – are polar opposites. She also likes how the characters interact, and she really likes the base of the story itself.

I have to say I agree with her on all of those things. I also really love the majority of the characters. Probably my favorite character relationship, though, is between the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat. It’s really fun to write them bickering constantly.

Overall I think I like collaborating, though I can only probably handle a couple of collaborations in the same time frame before it can get frustrating. It can definitely help to have someone else working on it, too, because there’s another whole brain full of ideas and they have a different viewpoint on things than you do, so it can be frustrating but also really interesting and helpful.

My Writing Process

My Writing Process

Posted on by R.M. Archer

My writing process has changed a lot in the last couple of weeks. For a long time after I started writing I didn’t really have a writing process. It was basically write whatever comes to mind, try to finish it in a timely manner (I never did) and then move on, and usually I was writing quite a few stories at the same time. On Aug. 1st I came up with a better idea, which was based on the idea of a bullet journal. I had the idea to make small daily goals on each of my current projects, which is something I feel like I should have come up with a lot sooner because it seems like such a “duh” thing. But anyway, I started doing that and it worked really well. (I wrote a post on my bullet journaling process here.)

Currently I’m working on two drafting projects, an editing project, and an outlining project, along with my blog and a short story on the side. I make goals on all or most of those each day, and then make color coded check-boxes for each goal each day. At the end of the day I mark them done, cancelled, or rescheduled and do a journal of my writing that day, putting the day’s word count by the date up at the top of the page. I’ll be writing a post about my bullet journal on Monday so you can see how that’s set up.

I’m a lot more productive now that I’ve started this, and I’m getting a lot of writing done. Although I had a dry spot at the end of last week/beginning of this week because I was really busy and tired and couldn’t bring myself to really do any writing.

Hopefully one of my drafts will be done my the end of the month, the other will have a sizable chunk out of it, the editing will be done, and I will have gotten a good ways through the outlining process. I hope to be able to write that planned story… maybe for NaNoWriMo, maybe for one of the Camps next year. I’m not sure yet what I’ll be working on for Nano since I have a couple of different options there. One of them depends on getting the other of my drafts done before then, which I think should be doable.

This process has done a lot for my blog, as well. I used to be posting really infrequently, but then I decided on the 9th to really buckle down and write a bunch of posts ahead of time so that I could be posting regularly, and then I wrote several of those between the 9th and 10th and scheduled them. Since then I’ve been a lot more active with writing posts and getting them scheduled and it’s been cool, even though I’m not really sure how many readers I have, if any.

My aim is to have a couple novel projects, an outlining project, and an editing project going at one time fairly consistently, at least for non-NaNo months. I think that’s working pretty well for me. I’m sure my process will alter somewhat as I go along, but I think I’ve finally found a system that works for me.

What does your writing process look like? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

My Bullet Journal

My Bullet Journal

Posted on by R.M. Archer

A bullet journal is something that I’ve seen lots of authors, and non-authors, using. I tried it out a while ago and it didn’t really work well for me. But I’m also pretty sure I was using it wrong, which probably affected the use I got out of it. At the beginning of the month I found a video that better explained how to use it (I’m not comfortable linking to said video because it had enough language in it I almost didn’t finish it) and decided to give it another try. I used the same notebook that my failed attempts are in, and now I consider my bullet journal starting at about page 23, because the rest of it isn’t really a bullet journal because I had no idea what I was doing. So here’s the process I’m using now, and hopefully it helps out someone else who is maybe in the same boat that I was in and doesn’t really understand the bullet journal system.

To begin with there’s a legend, which I originally used to mark pages, but now I use to mark goals. All but two of the above are stories I’m working on/I have waiting in the wings, and the colors aren’t nearly as dull as they look here, I’m just a really bad photographer. The ones written in lighter are ones that I expect to change the titles of.

This is a piece of my monthly “spread,” as it’s called in official videos. The dates are down the side, and I have written in the blog posts I’m putting up those days. (Hooray! You get a sneak peek of what’s coming up!) I also have icons next to those that I have events to go to.

This is below the end of my monthly list, though you can’t see that in this picture. It has my main goals for the month, and this month I have more than usual because before this system I didn’t really make myself goals.

This is my first daily spread. Beside the date I have my word count for that day, and then below that is my list of goals for the day. The arrows indicate I postponed that goal, and Xs indicate cancelled goals.

I also kind of use my bullet journal as a space to talk about my writing progress, and so for each day I have a journal section where I talk about my writing that day and how it went and if anything special happened. On the 4th I troubleshooted a part of House of Mages and mentioned a piece to cut, on the 7th I mentioned some cool things I’d learned while researching for Dark Queen Rising and that I finally picked a satisfactory name for one of the characters in that, etc. And there have also been days that I’ve used this space to make writing-related lists or notes, as well. I have a full two pages dedicated to blog post topics between the 9th and 10th (which really annoys me, but I needed the space).

Overall, this has really helped me because it gives me some accountability with myself. I like seeing the pretty colored boxes checked off. I’ve written a lot more this month than most non-NaNoWriMo months, I think. I’ve written 35,193 words this month already, and I had a 7k+ day, which I’m fairly certain has only happened once outside of NaNoWriMo. And it was also very instrumental in reviving my blog. I wouldn’t have started posting so regularly if not for the organization that my bullet journal has provided.

Overall, I’m very glad I found that video and learned how to use a bullet journal, because it has helped me a lot. Hopefully this post was helpful to you like that video was to me. :)

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A New Story Idea and Planning vs. Pantsing

Posted on by R.M. Archer

Hey guys!

I’ve spent the last couple of days planning out a new trilogy that I sort of started a few weeks ago, but before I decided to tangle all their plots together and make them all overlap (which is definitely the fun part!)

So remember Heart of the Baenor, which I wrote for Camp NaNoWriMo? Well, I plan on finishing that next month for July Camp, and then I’m starting on this new trilogy, which takes place three years after HotB. The first book focuses on Catessa in a new place (I won’t say too much more to avoid spoiling anything), and she’s one of three MCs, each in a different of three countries that are at war with each other. Anyway, Catessa catalysts the war, but not on her own plans.

The MC of the second book is the king’s Paladin in Mandoria (I know that country wasn’t mentioned in the Deep Worldbuilding Project. It decided to spring up after that and will take a little bit to get caught up to its neighbors), who has just inherited powers she doesn’t feel ready for, since her mentor recently passed away.

The MC of the third book is going to be my first character with a negative character arc, and she both excites and terrifies me. She’s a shapeshifter, one of very, very few in Themar, and she becomes friends with the prince of Roenor after she steals his crown (long story which will be explained in… the story.)

These three books are all taking place simultaneously, which makes it crucial for me to plan everything out pretty well in-depth so that I don’t mess anything up, and stick to that plan with every bit of willpower in me (but since it’s a really cool plan anyway it might not be so hard. ;))

The temporary title of the series is The Dark War Trilogy, which I like more every time I say it.

Planning this is a really interesting experience for me, since I don’t have a lot of experience with planning. I’ve been a pantser, or at the very least a plantser, for the majority of my writing “career.” I’ve planned a couple of books with the Hero’s Journey method, both of which are very old and I cringe to read, and I outlined HotB before I started it, but for the most part I don’t tend to plan much. Well with this one I’m working on a timeline (Aeon Timeline has been extremely helpful), and I’m going to write an outline, which may be similar to the one I did for HotB with just short explanations of key scenes in each chapter, or it might be more detailed.

Putting together a timeline has been a lot of fun, because I’m playing around with precision in the timing of things. For instance, two characters lose people they care about at the exact same time, and then end up talking about it (which will be a very tense conversation), and then splitting for a few days before one of them comes back a lot harder. And all of the assassinations that happen take place at the exact same time of night. All the successful ones, anyway. Being precise can be very, very fun, and I can make my characters suffer more with more precision, lol. #LifeofaPSK

I haven’t planned quite enough stories ahead of time to say whether planning or pantsing works better for me, but I’ve been more excited and had more motivation on the ones I’ve planned beforehand lately. It could just be coincidence, we’ll have to see, but I’m going to continue planning things for a while and see what happens, I think.

‘Til next time!