I’m not the most organized person.
In the early years of my life as a writer, I was in a writing group. We would start each session with a short writing exercise. One such exercise went like this. Write for five minutes about a place. Then five minutes about a person in that place. And finally, five minutes about something that happens in that place.
I wrote about a church on a hill and an old priest who presided there. And finally, about a man who came to the church to find answers to his life’s struggles. When we read our efforts, others seemed to really like what I had done, and I did feel like I had caught something in those 15 minutes of writing.
I didn’t follow up on what I produced for a couple of years. Why? Because I lost it. At some point, I decided to return to that piece and carry it forward. I searched everywhere and couldn’t find it. I gave up.
Around six months later, I thought of it again and searched again. I couldn’t find it anywhere. At some point, I decided to try to recreate it, but what I produced lacked what I had captured in the earlier piece. I gave up again.
Around another six months later, I searched again and found it buried in a notebook. I then took that piece and wrote my second novel — what I think is my best work, but it was published for only a short period of time because it has some autobiographical details that caused too much hurt for others.
More recently, I was searching on my blog for something I wrote for Father’s Day a number of years ago. The search terms resulted in the first result being a story I wrote in response to a writing exercise on Toasted Cheese. The exercise was a more manageable version of NaNoWriMo. Instead of 50,000 words in a month, write 167 words a day for a 5,000 word short story.
I have absolutely no memory of the story I found. It’s not complete and now it’s been added to the ever-growing list of ideas, starts, and half-completed stories I hope to get to before my time on earth is done. Finding this story makes me wonder what else I’ve forgotten about, either in notebooks or in the bowels of my blogs.
So … how do you maintain your story files? Like me, are they everywhere and anywhere? I have notebooks from the early days of my writing life, scraps of paper, folders and piles from those days. These days, everything I write ends up on the computer, on my laptop’s hard drive, an external drive, and more recently in the OneDrive Cloud. But there may be other things on my blogs that aren’t in any of those locations.
Or, have you managed to maintain some semblance of organization and know that all of your stops and starts are in one location and you remember everything you’ve written?
Writers Supporting Writers 
My precomputer work is in folders in a file box in my study closet. More current stories are on my computer and backed up on external hard drive. The current ideas are all over the place on scribble notes, in notebooks, in Evernote, and on Google Drive.
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I really need to go through all of the paper I accumulated when I started this 20 years ago. From the workshops and writing groups and just random ideas I jotted down to see what else I’ve forgotten.
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Everywhere and anywhere and all over the place. Sometimes I’ll be looking through old files, see a name I don’t recognize, and then realize it’s some story idea I had and then forgot about. I’m terrible at organizing files.
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Glad I’m not alone.
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I have a notebook of ideas and a file on the computer called Fits and Starts. A couple of months ago, I went through the notebook and wrote out a fresh list of story ideas. I’ve actually written 3 stories based on some of them. Two are in very rough first drafts and one is pretty much finished. (That’s the one I’m about to prompt ChatGPT with, but for some reason I’m reluctant to engage with it.)
The real trick is to recapture the spirit of the idea months or years later from the minimal notes. Sometimes I look at the notes and wonder what I was thinking when I wrote them.
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Yes … recapturing the spirit is the challenge.
I’m adding to my list of summer things to get done that I need to go through everything … both scraps of paper and notebooks, and computer files and see what I have. Oh, and search my blogs to see what is hidden there as well.
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I have documents with story ideas and other documents with stories themselves (finished or otherwise). Your post reminds me I really should be more organized with these things!
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Writing ideas down is only the beginning; we have to revisit the notes and do something with them, or they’re just as lost as if we hadn’t bothered.
Apologies for being late with this comment; it ended up in the spam folder, as sometimes happens.
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There is so much about this that might work better if I approached this as I approached my “real” work. But then … it would be work.
That said, this is one of my missions for the final half of 2023. Find a way to instill some work type discipline so I can start checking things off my list.
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I found it helped to have a defined project in mind and then to work on it for a specific time every day. I used a page rather than a time period. Once I had written that page (about 500 words) I was done for the day and no longer had to feel that creeping “I should be writing” guilt.
But you don’t want it to turn into work.
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I like your one page a day idea. It’s totally manageable. But it just doesn’t seem to be how I do this thing. I’m still looking for the “right” way to approach writing.
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There is no formula. I hope you figure it out.
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Thanks. In bits and pieces, I manage to get things done.
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