Day 14 – a Place for Your Writing

When the big NaNoWriMo clock starts ticking you won’t want to waste time or energy organizing your source material, running searches for lost items, trying to recall where on your computer you stashed this or that file, etc.

The answer is to create a single place on your computer where all your NaNoWriMo-related files live. So here’s today’s mini-task: take some time to gather your web links and snippets, video and audio files, photos, text files, whatever sources of material you think you’ll be looking for once the work begins.

Designate one folder as the place where all your resource files will be within reach at all times. Set up a few subfolders to differentiate your resources. Keep it simple — the fewer the better — and name them according to whatever system makes most sense to you (some people like to file by subject, for example, others by chapter or section, etc.)

Don’t forget the not-so-obvious. Will you need certain cuts of music to put you in the right mood? Drop ‘em in. Same for photos and art works that evoke the spirit of a story you might be telling.

One subfolder should contain your draft files, numbered in sequence. I create a different MS Word file for each day’s work. Why? 30 small files are easier to work with than one Godzilla-sized repository of 50,000 words.

Obviously, you can put this together by yourself and it will be perfectly adequate. If you want to go First Class, I recommend one of the applications developed especially for this job. The premier among them Scrivener, is Mac only, but Windows folks can get by just fine with Page Four, a similar package.

Whatever you use, be sure you’re comfortable with it. After all, that’s the point — to reduce any kind of extraneous distraction so that you can concentrate entirely on the flow of words you need to produce in each day’s work.