by Stephanie Morrill
Stephanie writes young adult contemporary novels and is the creator of GoTeenWriters.com. Her novels include The Reinvention of Skylar Hoyt series (Revell) and the Ellie Sweet books (Playlist). You can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and check out samples of her work on her author website including the free novella, Throwing Stones.
And, we’re back!
Hope everyone had a great last two weeks. I know some of you got to meet Jill in Kansas City (so jealous!) while I was off trekking around the Tetons and Yellowstone National Park with these cuties:
On the boat across Jenny Lake |
McKenna and Connor, loving life… |
Though somehow I managed to put in an appearance at the One Year Adventure Novel Summer camp as well…
“Me” signing a book for a teen writer. With Jill standing quite close. |
Wherever I actually was, it’s nice to be back home.
Several writers in the last month have emailed to ask me about how to keep track of story ideas.
Until recently, I never had a good system for organizing my story ideas. I think better with paper and pen, so typically I would scratch a few notes on a scrap of paper. I might type up a few things or I might just stick it on my corkboard, but I didn’t have a system for hanging onto or fleshing out story ideas.
Once a story idea is more than just a few sentences floating around in my head, I’ll give it its own page within my story ideas document:
Or sometimes all I have are general thoughts about the story, like the theme or a character name or something the character could discover near the climax of the story. Any thought I have, I write them down.
Jill Williamson: I keep all mine on a flash drive and back it up on my computer. The flash drive has a folder for writing, and inside that is a folder for each series idea, inside that, each book. I also have a shelf of manila folders labeled with each series title in which I keep all my ideas/maps/character pics, etc. I don’t have a folder and a computer file for every idea. The computer files are only for the ideas that I’ve started to write. But I have paper folders for all the ideas I’ve started plus dozens of ideas I haven’t started writing. I just like to have a place to put things when ideas do pop into my head.
Shannon Dittemore: I have a folder on my computer desktop called WIPs. Inside that folder are word docs. Some are stories I’ve set aside for the time being and others are just scribbled out ideas. Whenever I have a story I want to work on later, I try to open a word doc and get the ideas down. If I don’t, I will absolutely forget them. I get story ideas most often during worship services and I’ll scratch them out on a bulletin as soon as I can, but if I don’t retype them on my computer when I get home, they’re gone.
Melanie Dickerson: I open a new folder for each new book. In that folder I put all the files pertaining to that book, like character names, deleted scenes, early drafts, synopsis, proposal, etc.
- I love the idea, but it doesn’t fit my genre so I can’t prioritize writing it at the moment.
- I’m contracted for something else. (That’s my favorite reason to not be able to work on a book!)
- I like the idea, but I know there are a few plot holes in it. I’m giving myself time to figure those out.
- I lost my passion for it around chapter two, and it may not come back.
- The idea is way harder than I thought it would be, so I’m giving myself some time.
I’ve used several of these methods but my problem is I get these crazy scenes stuck in my head but I can’t seem to flesh them out or finish the story. If I do the rest is just blah, blah, blah.