If I was teaching a college course for credit, I might be interested in teaching a semester and calling it “Organization and the Novelist.” One of the phrases I repeat on this website is this: Proper planning Prevents Poor Performance. Another phrase I repeat is this – Fail to plan, plan to fail.
It takes a certain amount of work and time to write a novel. It takes much more time to edit a novel – and editing is where the experts say the novel is really written.
Let’s just take a look at the Scrivener menu options – a scene can be marked as being rough draft, first draft, revised draft, Final Draft. If it took the same amount of time to revise it, it would take four times as long to edit it as it would to write it.
What editing is not
Editing your novel is not the activity we do most often – I call it the poke phase. We often read our manuscript, chuckling and amusing over our cleverness and talent. Every ten minutes, we change a word, and smile. Perhaps we write a sentence or two.
That’s not editing.
There are multiple editing steps. Have you taken an Excel or Calc spreadsheet and entered in the formulas for dividing your novel into its various story structures, and compared how well your novel fits structure?
That’s the first step of a structure edit, making sure your novel isn’t too long in act 1 (”Book takes too long to get started”), too long in act 2 (”gets bogged down”, “boring”) and act 3 (”too quick”, “Too long”, “over too quickly”). If you’ve ever heard any of those criticisms, then you need to stop what you’re doing immediately, get a couple of courses on Excel and learn how to do simple spreadsheet calculations. Then you need to do rapid and immediate surgery on your novel, excising parts, transplanting others, implanting missing scenes.
This is a crucial step, one almost every writer forgets to do, doesn’t know to do, or is too lazy to do. And most agents and editors say this is the most crucial edit phase!
Out of all the reasons novels get rejected, the most common one is taking far too long to get to the inciting incident. If you haven’t hit this by page 30 (and compellingly enough), your book is rejected.
Most common reason they’re rejected.
How do you track these editing phases?
This is the question for you. How are you tracking them?
What gets scheduled, gets done
Michael Hyatt
If you are not tracking them, you probably are not doing them.
First step – use a scheduling program like Microsoft Calender. I don’t have a Mac, so I don’t know what the Mac calendar program is called. This way you can schedule in your editing sessions and your writing sessions. Remember, what gets scheduled – gets done. There’s dozens of scheduling programs – pick one.
My advice is don’t do writing and editing at the same time. I’ve done editing sessions, took a break, then done writing – and it helped. You have to disassociate your brain between the activities. Editing is analytical – writing is emotive. They are done with different hemispheres of the brain.
Speaking of Hemispheres, I can recall long afternoons listening to that album!
Anyway (80’s throwback moment), once you have a scheduling program, you should look into a project management system. Every book you have is a separate project, and every phase of it needs to be tracked. Some people use Trello for this – I use Asana. Asana uses the Kanban board style as well as a linear board. I’ve tried both, and both systems work well for me, the Kanban-Trello style a little better. Asana was something I was already using, because a producer I was working with wanted to use it.
Trello or Asana – You choose.
I’d recommend a to-do program as well, but that’s up to you. A lot of things I use is duplicative, and I’m getting ready to automation to solve that problem. I use Microsoft To Do, which is actually part of Microsoft Calendar. Some people use To-Doist. I tried it and liked it, but… already had Microsoft To-Do. And To-Do is free.
Optional – to do program. To-Do, To-Doist, etc.
A good password manager helps too – I use Last Pass. I’d recommend using the Last Pass “Suggest a password” feature, and the autofill. It’s hard to break your password (I know, it’s your kid’s name nad your cat’s name mixed, right?) if it’s a random jumble of capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers and symbols! I’m going to slowly go through my log ins and change all those as well. Does this get you organized? No, but it helps free up mental energy you need for creating and writing!
Archiving and note taking are important. I used Notebrowser and loved it, but I needed something more… flexible. So I moved to OneNote right about the time I’d taken my first Michael Hyatt seminar – and he recommended Evernote very strongly. I tried it, prepared to give it one week to try it.
Loved it by the end of the first hour. I have 11,000 notes in Evernote now. I use it to keep track of everything.
Since a lot of this is duplicative and oerlapping, I’ve been looking into task automation. So I’ve signed up for IFTTT and Zapier. I haven’t gotten them set up yet, but I should shortly. It’s possible to enter something into Evernote, and have it end up in Asana and Microsoft Calendar as well – all automatically. I just need a week off to learn it!
IFTTT or Zapier – I recommend both, since you’re limited by Zapier on the free plan, and IFTTT only lets you do one automation per software (I can’t track both video projects and book editing on Asana with IFTTT – but using Zapier as well, I’m able to.
Automation – optional. I can’t say yet if it helps or not, but there’s now about a dozen services like that, so people must find them useful.
Summary
Proper planning prevents poor performance. Fail to plan, plan to fail. What gets scheduled gets done. Remember these, and the passage of time will no longer startle you over forgotten tasks!
