InkyBlots

Back when typewriters ruled the earth, I outlined my first novel on 3×5 cards, giving each scene a card, with extra cards for bits of dialogue or narrative I wanted to use. It worked great, and allowed me to rearrange scenes and dialogue as I liked.

Since those dim, lost times we’ve been blessed with the personal computer and word processing software.  But I still like the file card idea, and I’ve worked out my own system for adapting it to today’s technology.

If you’ve come up with the same thing on your own, don’t tell me about it. I like to think it’s mine.

I’m not a sophisticated, Moleskine kind of guy. When I sprout an idea, my habit is to scribble it down on any scrap of paper I can find, fold it into my pocket planner, and take it home. Then, during writing time, I transcribe it (assuming, of course, I can read it) into an MS Word document, titled something like Novel, or Short Story, or Desperate Plea for Attention.

As I accumulate notes, they go into the document in the order I expect them to occupy in the final manuscript (if I change my mind, Cut and Paste is my friend).

Eventually, this accumulation starts to look pretty much like an outline, assuming you’re not too fastidious. Not a formal outline, with Roman numerals and subheads, but the kind of outline you have when you’re working with a pile of file cards.

Then, when I feel I have enough outline to start working from, I begin my story, at the top of the same document. As I use each point of the outline, I delete it from the tail end.

In the course of time I will have a completed story, with a forlorn litter of unused ideas at the end, like the greasy detritus at the bottom of a potato chip bag. I delete these. (I could also save them to a new document for use some other day, but I know from experience I’d just forget about them.)

That’s how I get a first draft.  The fact that it will certainly stink on ice is not the system’s fault, or even my own. First drafts are supposed to stink. That’s their function.

But that’s for another writer’s tip.

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Lars (pronounced Larce) Walker is a native of Kenyon, Minnesota, and lives in Minneapolis. He has worked as a crabmeat packer in Alaska, a radio announcer, a church secretary and an administrative assistant, and is presently librarian and bookstore manager for the schools of the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations in Plymouth, Minnesota.

Visit Lars online at www.larswalker.com/ and his blog at www.brandywinebooks.net/ .