How to Keep Track of Story Ideas

Ideas for articles, stories and novels can come at any time of the day or night. Writers scribble these ideas down in notebooks and phonebooks, on the backs of receipts and diner napkins. The unfortunate result is that often these great ideas get misplaced or thrown out; there's nothing worse than finding a great line of dialogue that you didn't use, months after the story's already been published.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Small spiral or journal notebooks, with perforated pages
• Standard or legal size notepads
• Binder clips
• Standard or legal size file folders
• File drawer space or file storage box
• Hard drive space

1. Purchase a small notebook with perforated pages. Carry this notebook with you at all times, to jot down any of your writing ideas the moment they occur. Make sure to keep notes for separate pieces or stories on different sheets of paper.
2. Buy a stack of notepads; they're great for writing and are cheaper when bought in bulk. Legal size allows more room on each page, but standard size will work, too. Label each pad with the title of one of your works. Any writing you do for that title should be done on that notepad.
3. Label file folders (sized the same as your notepads) with the titles of each story you are working on. Arrange alphabetically in a file drawer or box.
4. Empty out your small notebook at regular intervals. Remove the pages you've taken notes on, and file them in the appropriate story folder. Clip pages together with small binder clips.
5. Keep your notepads in the appropriate file folders when you're not using them.
6. File any work you do for a story--note cards, outlines, draft copies. Use binder clips to keep like items together. Now all of your work is in one place, easily accessed whenever you want to work on it.
7. Follow the same principles with your online work. Create separate file folders for each story title. Create a file for the text itself, one for any notes or ideas, one for an outline and so forth. If you edit a large chunk of text from a chapter, but feel it might be useful in the future, you can create a file to save these bits of writing for later. You can even add separate files in that folder for a list of publishers you submitted to, query letters written, etc. Once again, whenever you go into that folder, everything related to that particular story will be there for you to utilize.
8. Stick to the filing plan. It takes an investment of time to set up a filing system. Maintaining the system as you go is the easiest and most time efficient way to get the most out of that system. If, every few months, you need to spend hours sorting through all of your notes and filing them, this is time wasted that could have been spent writing.

Tips & Warnings

• Use whatever format works best for you. Instead of legal pads, you can use spiral notebooks with perforated pages, and then insert them into divided binders. Whatever style of paper you use, the key is to make it easy to file all the relevant work on a story in one place.
• If working on a large story or novel, you can also create folders for each chapter--or for different segments of the story. Use whatever number of divisions works best for you, and that helps make your ideas easy to find.