Organise your writing

This system that I use for organising scenes and chapters in a story or novel might be useful for other writers who are writing a story that is pretty long.

It assumes that you print a copy of your writing as well as store it on their computer or portable storage device such as a memory stick or external hard drive.
Why is it necessary to print it? Surely computers and portage storage devices are so reliable there is no need to print them?
They are very reliable, but there is always the possibility, however remote, that they can fail, and if they do fail you have lost your entire work.
Also, it’s useful to have a printed version of your story because you can view it as a reader would view it – as a printed page. More about that in a future post.

System for organising writing

Anyway, to the system that I use.
Firstly, each scene or chapter is given a title, this title is always at the top of the scene or chapter and it is always typed in capital letters.
The title should explain what the scene is about, and it should explain it as concisely as possible.
For example, if you are writing a story about a character called for example Sarah, and if for example she meets a stranger in a restaurant, the title should be something like ‘Sarah meets stranger in restaurant’ (without the quotation marks.)
It isn’t a good idea to title this scene ‘Sarah meets stranger for dinner in restaurant’ or ‘Sarah meets stranger for dinner in expensive restaurant’ (again, without the quotation marks.)
The reason for keeping the description brief like this will be explained in a further post.
In a post called ‘organise your writing part 2‘ I explain why this is a better idea than giving your scenes and chapters a number, ie. scene 10, chapter 19 etc.