Something that writers don’t seem to speak of often is the administrative side of writing. The pages and pages of notes and research that have to be sorted and arranged for easiest use and access whilst writing. The images, calendars, and maps. The timelines and outlines that are constantly being altered, and how these constant alterations are fitted into the manuscript itself. The research – links, screenshots, saved images, copied and pasted text – all of which has to be sourced because otherwise you’ll forget which website you took that information from and now you need to cross-reference it to make sure it’s not nonsense … If you put all your reference images, soundclips, videos, etc., into Scrivener, that keeps everything together, but does it make the Scrivener file too bulky? Is it just as easy to keep all these things in the project folder that already has the manuscript in it?
And where should this paragraph be stored? It’s part of a draft copy of a conversation that you’ve written out six times and you could probably delete it but you might conceivably need it later … should you number these drafts? Do they need their own file? If you put them in a separate file will you forget that they are there? Does this minor character need their own character sheet, or should they just get a few notes at the bottom of your master notes document? Is the master notes document getting so enormous that it’s unwieldy? Can you find things within it easily enough or do you need to break it up into smaller documents? If you do, will you be able to find things or will you be constantly flipping through all the smaller documents trying to find that particular paragraph in which you decided what the minor character’s political affiliation is? Where did you put that snippet about the history of phlebotomy, and should it go in the ‘medicine’ section of your notes or does phlebotomy need its own section? Have you updated the manuscript to reflect the changes you made to the timeline last night or were you planning to do that today? Are these notes you left yourself about that particular aspect of the story still current or have you fixed that part already? And then there’s colour coding: blue for passages that need more research, turquoise for tasks that are completed, pink for things you need to remember as you continue writing, red for things that urgently need changing, orange for things that might need changing depending on what else happens, grey for passages you’re no longer convinced you want to keep …
Managing a large writing project is an important aspect of the project in itself. Every world, every narrative, every character a writer creates needs to have all its details recorded in order to avoid a thousand continuity errors that will be jarringly obvious to the reader but which got lost somewhere in the overcrowded chaos of the writer's mind. I use all the techniques mentioned above, and I have organisational systems in place to make sure I can find everything with minimal difficulty and don't end up making stupid mistakes; but there are still times when I spend five minutes trying to locate a particular passage in my notes or manuscript, or find an old note to myself and think, "What was this about? Have I dealt with this already?" and have to spend ten minutes of precious writing-time ascertaining that yes, I did deal with that issue, but I forgot to change the note's colour from red – 'must deal with this' – to turquoise – 'have dealt with this'. Sometimes, the alarming question of "Why did I change that? What did past me know that current me has forgotten?" arises.
And this is only the administrative side of writing. The management of a writing project, without making any mention of managing the story or the characters or the themes or the style or the setting ... or blogging, or social media, or self-publishing, or cover design ...
The scraping-together of a coherent, entertaining, hopefully even edifying, narrative, with no continuity errors or glaring inconsistencies, out of thin air, is a task on a level of difficulty that is beyond the understanding of those who have not achieved it, and deeply intimidating even to those who have achieved it multiple times.
