Organizing Chaos by Beth White

Elizabeth White writes inspirational romance (sometimes with a comedic twist, sometimes on the suspenseful edge, and sometimes in a historic mode) for Zondervan and Steeple Hill. She lives in the Deep South—so deep that if you drove a few more miles you’d fall into the Gulf of Mexico, which she doesn’t recommend. Her two children are now young adults and pretty much stay out of her hair, and her husband is an executive pastor at a big ole Baptist church, where Beth teaches second-graders in Sunday school and plays flute in the orchestra.

Beth’s latest book, Controlling Interest, is a detective caper in the great literary tradition of “Moonlighting.” Come on, it was fun!

Beth's website is www.elizabethwhite.net

ORGANIZING CHAOS

If my husband were to see the title of this post, he would fall down laughing. “You’ve got the chaos part down to a science, but ORGANIZED?” Not so much. Well, I sniff, I have managed to write and publish fourteen novels in the last ten years. How do you suppose that happened? Sheer dumb luck is not on the table.

Of course the providence of God has a lot to do with it. But I’m also a firm believer in investing talents for maximum growth (see Matthew 25: 14-30). Oh yeah, I know, the parable Jesus told isn’t overtly about abilities, it’s about money. But the principle holds. So let’s invest our talent in some organizational strategies.

Let’s say you’ve got the storytelling gene. Ideas won’t leave you alone. Imaginary people are way more fun than real ones. And other people seem to actually enjoy reading what you make up. I submit that this type of creative personality is often the out-of-control unfocused Tasmanian Devil of the literary world. Is anybody raising a hand with me?

In fact, it took me a week to start writing this article because every morning I would look at my friend Cara’s email (which reminded me that I’d told her three weeks ago I would write it) and think, “Boy, I should totally do that.” “That looks like hard work.” “I don’t have the first idea what to say.” “Maybe I should be working on my revisions.” “Oh! Look at that spider web over there—Raid!!”Um…you see what my husband means?

So here I am trying to figure out how to help other Tasmanian Devils (TDs) conquer their ADD (which, by the way, is the current psychobabble term for us easily distracted creative sorts). My personal type of TD is a very quiet, subversive one. The kind where you can be sitting in a room full of people and completely zone out into your own interior world—and forget you’re at your future daughter-in-law’s bridal shower. The kind where you get on the Internet to look something up and you keep clicking on links—until three hours have gone by and you can’t remember what the original question was. The kind where you suddenly remember your 18th Century Novels final was yesterday.

Sneaky.

Since I choose not to pursue medication, I’ve learned the fine arts of calendaring, filing, and sticky-notes. And today I declare myself, not cured, but under relative control and capable of completing large, complicated projects like novel-writing.Unfortunately, I’ll have to confess that I did not come to this in a blinding flash of revelation or even learn it in a seminar. It started with my husband literally begging me to try a Daytimer system: “The odds of you actually remembering something are astronomically higher if you write it down.” Grumble grumble. So I bought one of those black leather notebooks with a monthly calendar and a daily calendar.

Lo and behold, I started remembering most if not all of my appointments and deadlines (once I got in a habit of looking at the thing every day). Now it’s almost an obsession, keeping to-do lists and checking them off. And now that we’re in the 21st Century I keep all that on my iCalendar on my Mac—but I still carry that notebook around everywhere I go.

The second thing that revolutionized my writing life was a filing system. For every book I start, I set up a file with nine subfiles:

• Business
• Chapters
• Characters
• Cover
• Drafts
• Fan Mail
• Outlines
• Research
• Reviews

Most of those are self-explanatory, but I’ll elaborate on outlines a bit.

When I’m planning a book, I usually run the story through a Hero’s Journey (a la Christopher Vogler), a GMC chart (see Deb Dixon’s book), and a snowflake (see Randy Ingermanson’s excellent article on his website). Ideally all of those should match, but they help me come at the story in several different ways in order to write a coherent and complete synopsis. Then, as I write the first draft of the manuscript, I fill in an Excel worksheet with each chapter vertically subdivided into scenes and analyzed horizontally for POV character, date and time, location, event, and approximate word count.

Any time I look up something related to that book I put it in a Word document and stick it in the Research file. Any correspondence is saved to the appropriate file. All information pertinent to characters as they develop are noted—which seems like it would take too much time but ultimately saves huge amounts of time—because it keeps me from having to search through an entire manuscript to find out, for example, what did I name the next-door neighbor’s dog and what breed was it?

Now I’m starting to actually sound organized, am I not? Hah! Take that, Scott White! Trust me, I learned all this the HARD way.

Third helpful tool is the Sticky Note feature on my computer desktop. Let’s say I’m writing along and I need to know what year the stethoscope was invented (true story). Instead of getting on the Internet (at the risk of losing three hours to the history of gall bladder surgery—true story), I fill a sticky note with all the things I need to look up while I’m watching Psych later that night. They’re also useful for making notes during revisions. That way I don’t forget to change the heroine’s hoodie from University of South Alabama to Ole Miss (for example).

Wow. This is probably way more information than anybody wanted. But it’s real, and it makes my chaos manageable. You naturally organized people are probably laughing your socks off. But for the rest of us Tasmanian Devils…every little bit of help…