#which doesn't include the folder of individually edited chapters

[aturinfortheworse]

it may have taken me 15 years but i have finally learned to make sure each draft of a book contains a note right at the start saying "Here's when I started this draft and why and how it relates to the other twenty-seven-and-a-half drafts with titles like 'The Remaining Gods 2018 (Older) Unabridged Edited.'"

[practically-an-x-man]

TST Question!

Do you have a lot of WIPs and how do you wrangle/organize/not get overwhelmed by the ones you have?

Ooooh good question! Thank you!!

Talk Shop Tuesday

I ABSOLUTELY have a lot of WIPs, and it's hard to keep them organized!! There's a few levels to how I organize them:

I have a masterlist ideas doc that I use for keeping track of the overarching OC ideas - not specific fics, mainly just a list of OCs/pairings on top and a collection of other, semi-formed ideas underneath. Even with all the OCs I have posted, that doesn't even scratch the surface of the ideas in that document. Most of those unposted OCs are due for a revamp before I get to publishing them, but I hold onto the ideas for posterity

Each OC that is written gets their own document (plus a few characters I haven't yet written, but for whom I have very specific ideas I wanted to keep track of with outlines). I know a lot of writers use folders, or even put individual chapters of a longfic into different documents... I don't. If the document gets especially long (for instance, my document for A Love Once New is over 400 pages), I'll make a second document to put the side-pieces and other oneshots, but the vast majority of them are just a full compilation of all the ideas related to that character/story. I also have a "gift fics" doc for all of those.

And finally, in those documents, I do my outlines using brackets. While all the ideas are kept in the same document, each idea is visually separated using brackets, page breaks, and just visual space (read: hitting Enter a few times) so it's not just some huge wall of random ideas

The reason I keep most of my ideas for each OC in the same document is because that lets me keep track of any small details without needing to make a separate character log for everything. Need to remember where things ended off in the last chapter? Need to remember which side I put a character's injury after a fight scene? Need to grab a specific line for a stylistic "echo" later on? When they're in the same document, I can just do a Find and Replace instead of having to pore through separate documents for each story.

I also tend to do my outlines in loose paragraph form rather than bullet points or another style. This helps me get not only the overview of events for the piece, but also the tone, emotional progression, and other details that have come to me. Sometimes I even get little snippets of dialogue or come up with a well-phrased line I want to include, so I'll jot those down alongside it to include once I get to officially writing it down. I really just make one sweep when I write, outline straight to final draft with minimal editing, so having a detailed outline helps me jump straight into that world with minimal extra work.