Are You a Piler or a Filer?

by Rachael Phillips

Over the years, I have discovered that God designs writers with His usual love for diversity. However, when it comes to the organizational aspects of our profession, we fall into two basic groups. With a scratch-my-head bow to our Father (I never will understand why He created people the way He did), and an apology to Jeff Foxworthy, I suggest the following:

You might be a piler if:

·         You have an office but never write there because you can’t find your computer.

·         Does your office have carpet? You’ve forgotten. Also, whether it has a window.

·         You just moved into the house next door because the books you bought have taken over the first one.

·         You still haven’t unpacked from the 2006 ACFW conference.  

·         The number of your undeleted e-mail messages exceeds that of the national debt.

·         Your smartphone, having given up on organizing you, has run away from home.

·         You still have every story you’ve written since kindergarten. And every story your children have written. And every story your grandchildren have written. Plus all the rough drafts.

Contrariwise, you might be a filer if:

·         You can see the top of your desk. No respectable piler would permit such a thing.

·         You have programmed morning, noon and night tweets through the year 2021.

·         You color-code your rejection letters.

·         You actually know where your writing goal list is.

·         Every friend of yours on Facebook has been categorized according to relationship, location, hairdo, and Popsicle flavor preference.

·         Your idea of a good time is to alphabetize your recycling.

Yes, God knows where your membership belongs. So does your spouse. And your friends.

How about you? Fill in the blank: you might be a filer/piler if you                         .

  

How I Organize my Research

I just finished polishing my book of Canadian biographies for middle grades. I’m super excited because this will be my first very own book! I’ve been published in compilations but I can’t wait to see my name on the cover of this one. Exciting stuff. (Release date to be announced soon!)

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing a book, it’s that I’ve got to be organized. I’ve learned to reduce the amount of paper on my desk, and make use of digital ways to keep track of my research and keep it accessible. Here are a few tools I use.

LiveBinders helps me keep track of websites. With LiveBinders I can make as many folders as I like and keep them private or public. I have folders for everything from research topics, teaching ideas, writing project ideas, dream vacations, and interior decorating.

I also use a program to create a bibliography. Since I’m taking college classes, I can use my college’s online program called Noodle Tools. I just plug in the information and it creates it all by itself. If you don’t have access to something like this, you can also use the bibliography feature in your word processing program, but you'll have to check the MA and APA guidelines to make sure your program is up to date. There is an online bibliography tool, BibMe, but I haven't used it myself to see if it formats for APA or MA. What's cool about BibMe is that you can use the ISBN number of your books and it automatically plugs in the information from that book.

I highly suggest entering your resource information into the bibliography as you go along to save time later when the deadline crunch is on.

Why a bibliography? In fiction, you may want to refer your readers to the sites you used in your research via your blog. In non-fiction, many publishers require one, depending on the subject.

I know that a lot of writers like to use Evernote. Michael Hyatt of Thomas Nelson Publishers swears by it. I'm just beginning to master the program and I love it. You can clip web pages and write your own notes right beside them. It’s also mobile and accessible on your smart phone and you can e-mail your clips, pictures and notes straight into your folders. For a little more help in learning your way around it, check out the Evernote blog. I'm using it for my next project and so far I can already see how helpful it is in keeping me organized and inspired.

Another nifty online tool is the Awesome Highlighter. This website allows you to highlight portions of a website you want to  keep. You can copy the highlighted parts to your clipboard or e-mail them to yourself. I don't use this because it's one of the things you can also do in Evernote. But for someone who can't find their way around Evernote, this is handy and super easy.

I still use real-world notebooks, folders and books for my research.  When I write historical subjects, I usually have to buy my books used (either off of Amazon or ebay). I mark the useful portions in the margins with a bold highlighter and/or with a post-it note. I sometimes buy artifacts off ebay, such as postcards or newspaper articles from the time period. It’s always a treat when a used book arrives with old newspaper article about the subject tucked inside. This happens quite often and is another perk of buying old used books.

I only keep one binder for the resources I’ve printed off the Internet. When the binder is full and I’m finished with that particular section of research, I throw the papers away. I can do this because I’ve already saved the resource digitally on my computer and in my bibliography. So far, I've never regretted getting rid of the paper. (Yes, I do recycle.)

One thing I do struggle with is which books to keep and which to let go. If I hoard anything it's good books. I'm of the opinion that one can never have too many books or too many shelves to keep them on. (Note the tiny portion of  my to-the-ceiling shelves in the above pic.) I do have a Kindle that I enjoy, but I still love my three-dimensional, real world, smell-the-ink books.

I’d love to learn what you use to keep up with your investigations. How do you keep your research organized? Do you prefer digital or physical resources and files? Which books do you keep and which ones do you let go? How do you decide? This curious book-hoarder wants to know!

Karla Akins is a pastor's wife, mother of five, and grandma to five beautiful little girls. She lives in North Manchester with her husband, twin teenage boys with autism, and three crazy dogs. Her favorite color is purple, favorite hobby is shoes, and favorite  food group is cupcakes.

Saga of the Clean Desk Resolution er, Maybe

It's a new year: time to embrace new habits, turn over new leaves, determine to write without cliches--and vow to keep a clean desk. Out of all the new year's resolutions I make, keeping my desk clean on a daily basis is the most challenging.

But from what I've discovered via self-help blogs this morning, keeping this resolution will be a lot easier than I thought.

Tip #1: Organize the paper on your desk. Acquire an in-box, an incubate box, a tickler file, current projects rack, file cabinet, recycling bin, garbage bin and shredder. That sounds like an awful lot of things for me to keep track of. At my age I'm doing well to find my desk. My method of using post-it notes to keep track of my piles serves me pretty well, so I'm sticking with it.

Tip #2: Banish post-it notes because they're ugly. That's a rather subjective opinion, don't you think?  You might have ugly post-it notes, but I have pretty purple ones, butterfly shaped ones, some that look like apples, flowers and ice cream cones. Besides, if I don't leave notes pointing me to my glasses every morning I won't be able to see them anyway. And once I find my glasses, I need my post-its to remind me what my protag is doing next and that I have a doctor's appointment. Nope. The post-it notes stay. Otherwise I could end up being kidnapped by a biker gang and searching for my epiphany while my male protag ends up going to my gynecologist.

Tip #3: Trash those printouts. This is a great idea except that, I can't always find the document on my computer because I'm old school. Sure, it might look like the printer threw up on my desk, but I know exactly where I put that page of research I did on giant squids for my turn of the century naval adventure. I'm pretty sure it's filed under that cupcake post-it note attached to the ice cream post-it ...no wait, that's a real cupcake...strawberry sprinkles! My favorite!

Tip #4: Keep blank file folders and a label marker near your desk. Like how near? And how do you expect me to add this to my current array of papers and post-its? Which box do these go in? The tickle one or the incubator one?

Tip #5: Throw away pens. Are you kidding me? I'm a writer. We can never find a pen when we need one.


Tip #6: Say no to schwag. You know, all that free stuff you get at conventions like pens, stickers, free magazines, brochures, bookmarks and books. Hello? I'm a self-employed writer. I need all the free junk I can get.(Especially pens.) I can always try to sell the other stuff if my contracts don't come through or burn it for fuel when they turn off the utilities.

Tip #7: Get rid of any books you don't use on a regular basis. Uhm, I'm in the book writing business, and while I might not read every book I own every single day, they are my friends, my buds, my posse. Who else is going to listen to my plotting strategies without talking back? I depend on them to surround me with literary affection and love. My books are staying thankyouverymuch.

Tip #8: Eat away from your desk. Like that's going to happen when often the only writing time in my day is carved out during lunch. Now where'd I see that cupcake?

Tip #9: Limit photo frames on your desk. Photo frames? I have photo frames? There might be some filed underneath that ebook on organization I printed out the other day.

Tip #10: To get started organizing your desk, take everything out of the drawers and pile it on top of your desk and sort. Hey! I've got the first part of this tip licked already! But I'm too tired to sort today. I'll start on that tomorrow.

I better leave myself a note.