How To Organize Your Story Ideas
The everlasting power of a writer's notebook.
Have you ever wanted to write a story?
If so, you probably have tons of ideas swirling around your head.
They could be about characters or scenes or trivial details of your fictional world.
In this post I’m going to share the best strategy I’ve found for organizing ideas.
The goal is to get ideas out of your head and into a format that allows you to assess them.
That’s a key factor of the creative process:
Not all of your ideas will be gold.
Most will be bad, actually.
The mark of a master is being able to identify which ideas are worth using, and which should be left behind.
Get a notebook:
This notebook will become your best friend.
It’s where you’ll log all the ideas that pop into your head throughout the day.
For NORMIE, I’ve been using a Double A notebook that I bought in Bangkok, Thailand.
But the type of notebook you use doesn’t matter. Just make sure it has enough pages… you probably have lots of ideas.
I like to use a larger notebook so I don’t have to cram my writing onto the page.
🚨 Some writers disagree with writing down your ideas…
Stephen King is famous for saying, “I think the writer's notebook is the best way to immortalize bad ideas."
I disagree.
I’d much rather be able to go back and sort the good ideas from the bad.
Other creatives use notebooks to track their thinking, such as J.K. Rowling and Matt Reaves.
Have discipline:
Your writing notebook should be dedicated to one project.
You can have another notebook for random ideas for future projects (they’re not expensive).
Dedicating a notebook to one project allows you to immediately step back into the world of your story whenever you flip through the pages.
Remember, the goal of tracking our ideas is to be able to sort the good from the bad.
Having multiple projects detailed within one notebook makes you waste time by deciphering which story the information belongs to.
Get organized:
To make your life easier in the future, try to organize the story information you write into your notebook.
It’s not helpful to have random notes scrawled across dozens of pages. We want to make it easy to look back through our ideas.
Of course, your ideas will be random in the beginning. That’s okay. And there’s still a place for them in the notebook (#8 below).
Organize your notebook by dedicating entire pages to particular parts of the story.
Mark the top of each page with a heading that shows what it is about.
Some pages will be completely filled and spill onto another. Others won’t even be filled halfway. You want to make the notebook easy to flip back through.
Having the discipline to keep each page focused on a particular part of the story, and then filling the rest with related ideas, will make your life much easier.
Here are some headings you can use to organize the pages:
1. CHARACTERS
Dedicate a page to each character. Put his/her name at the top and fill the rest of the page with ideas.
What does he look like? How does she talk? What does he want?
Even if you’re not an artist (I’m definitely not), it’s helpful to draw them too.
2. SETTINGS
Do your characters change location throughout the story? Dedicate a page to each place.
What is the weather like? What currency do they use? What kind of buildings are there?
3. SCENES
You probably have tons of scenes and set pieces in mind.
Flesh them out in your notebook.
What characters are involved? What’s at stake? Where does the scene take place?
4. BACKSTORY
Did something happen in your fictional world that has ramifications on the story you’re writing? That’s a page.
What happened? Who was involved? Why is it relevant?
Draw a timeline if needed.
The story of NORMIE largely involves an event that happened 5 years before the actual novel, the White House Fire. I needed a section of my notebook to organize my ideas about what happened.
5. MACGUFFINS
MacGuffin - An object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself.
In NORMIE, the MacGuffin is the thumb drive that Jack Campbell finds in the first chapter.
6. STORY PROBLEMS
Is there a part of your story that you are unsure about?
Write the problem at the top of the page and fill the rest with ideas for solutions as they come to you.
In my NORMIE notebook, there’s a section titled, “When does NORMIE take place?”
The issue was mainly related to how closely the events of the story took place to the White House Fire. By getting my ideas on paper, I was able to work out a solution.
I knew the story would take place on an anniversary of the White House Fire, but couldn’t pin down if it should be 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, or 10 years. I needed the WHF to still be fresh in the minds of the characters, but also needed to give enough time for the USA to properly transition into United America. 5 years seemed to be the best choice.
7. WHAT IF…
Sometimes you’ll have random ideas for scenes that may alter the course of your story.
Write “What if…” at the top of the page and fill the rest with your new ideas.
You may find that the change is worth keeping.
Or maybe it’s an idea that should remain in the notebook.
8. NOTES
Do you have some ideas that are so random or small that they don’t warrant a full page yet?
Write NOTES at the top of a blank page and put them there.
This is really useful for the beginning stages of a project. The first several pages of my notebooks are usually reserved for random notes. You get more organized as time passes and the story starts to come together.
Final Thoughts:
You could really dedicate a page of your notebook to any detail of your story, no matter how big or small.
Hopefully this list gave you a good idea of how to approach the process.
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