The Place For My Writers Notes

aka Write Notes to Yourself

This is especially appropriate for projects that you have to pick up and put down over time, but I think it also might be useful for nanowrimo writers. The notion is very simple -- especially when you're sitting down or stopping your work, even if you think you'll be back soon and you're sure that you'll remember, write yourself some notes. What are you thinking about? What do you want to come back to later? What questions are percolating around in the little grey cells? What do you think you're going to do next right now? Just a line or two to remind you when you come back.

Even those of us who don't have the excuse of growing gray hairs often find that sometimes when coming back to pick up work in progress, you can't quite remember where you were and what you were going to do next. A couple of lines of notes can help resurrect that memory and make the pickup smoother. And when I'll get back to it soon turns into a somewhat more protracted delay than had been expected, those hints and reminders can be lifesavers.

I've been reading the online weekly serial novel Saltation at http://www.korval.com/saltation/ -- the authors are writing this in first draft on the web. And along the way, we've seen a few notes from the authors to themselves, reminders about things that need to be reworked, and such. So here we have an example of working writers who keep these kind of in-progress notes to help themselves stay on track.

I suppose if you want to you can use the Microsoft Word commenting features. I used to simply write these into the document, often with a standard such as Note: and then I could use find to locate them when I was doing revision or editing. As I took care of them, I would remove them, so that the final document wouldn't have any left in it. But while in progress, such embedded reminders to myself were gold. And of course, programs have comments so that you can include them -- and I used to enforce commenting standards on my programming groups.

When you're thinking about organizing and writing a novel -- 50,000 words, hundreds of pages? -- you need to plan on stepping away from the work and coming back. One way to help yourself do that is to make notes about where you're going as you stop. Then when you come back, reading the notes can help you get back into the swing quickly. You may also want to make notes as you're going as you realize various things. Maybe your hero just shot the villain with a crossbow, and you want to remind yourself to go back in revision and have the hero practicing with a crossbow ahead of time. Especially in nanowrimo, you shouldn't stop now and do that revision -- so write yourself a note to remind yourself to do it later. Or maybe you've just written a cute little scene with the hero and sidekick getting the sidekick's hair caught in the car window and having to untangle it. You might want to make a note that the sidekick has long hair, just to make it easier to remember what the sidekick looks like later without having to scramble around rereading your writing.

Admittedly, you don't want to spend all your time making notes to yourself. Still, I think at break times and when you have those "I want to remember this later" or "remind me to do this later" thoughts, writing your thoughts down is good practice. I certainly have found that the great idea I had yesterday that I wanted to remember to do today sometimes isn't quite as easy to remember today as I thought it would be. And it can be really frustrating to know that you had that insight yesterday -- what the heck was it?

Write it down. Scratch paper or notepads are really cheap. And they work fine, even without electronics.
tink
(about 675 words)
Scribble while you work - and when you stop, too!

[In regards to the subject line -- do you remember when passing notes in class was considered cheating? And as for writing little notes to yourself while studying and then reading them during the test -- well, most teachers frowned on that? When you're doing nanowrimo, it isn't cheating anymore :-]