I’ve often joked that I can organize anything–as long as it isn’t tangible.
I’m skilled in creating focused agendas, facilitating unwieldy meetings, planning schedules, and tackling complicated logistics–all with the goal of keeping things on track.
And having spent the day on a variety of editing projects, I again feel thankful for my superpower–being easily able to make a sentence flow more smoothly into the next, and sensing how to move ideas around to create a more satisfying and compelling arc from beginning to end.
But if you dump a roomful of objects on the floor, even with a set of organizing containers from your local big box store, and tell me to put them away in a logical, accessible and attractive manner–I will scream. Or cry. Or both.
So, I understand the sense of overwhelm many writers have when trying to organize their ideas, even if the process comes to me somewhat intuitively–if not in the first draft, than usually in the beginning stages of revision. Yet, my empathy is not going help those who feel strangled by the vines in the jungle of their unruly mind, as I learned quite humbly, during all the years I worked in a university, attempting to “teach” students the basics of coherent and engaging writing. It’s still a struggle to break down the process of organizing ideas (or anything I do intuitively) into small replicable steps. And it’s even harder to think about how to do this for poets, fiction writers and CNF writers, whose projects depend on a certain degree of unbridled creativity. But here are some things I’ve learned from being in the trenches. I hope they’re helpful:
(1) When generating material, always trust your “wild mind,” and let the ideas flow where they will, even if you don’t immediately sense the connections. There will be plenty of time to rope in (or eliminate) tangents later. And the relationships between things you uncover will surprise you–in a good way.
(2) Don’t self-censor while you are drafting. Sometimes I’ll get to a place and think, I really don’t want to write about that. This could be because it’s irrelevant, too revealing, unpleasant, silly, emotional, etc. But even when I don’t use these blips of material, they often serve as a bridge to the real thing I want to write about. If I don’t let myself build that bridge, the seed of what really matters to me will never sprout.
(3) Once you have your generated material, be playful with it. Feel free to eliminate whatever you want (ideally without judging that material as “bad,” just not needed) and take time to rearrange what’s left several different ways, adding whatever you think needs more context, clarity, or overall “oomph.” This is the time to start thinking about flow and what’s holding the piece together–i.e. what you really want to write about, and the various ways you can get from the beginning of your writing path to the end.
(4) After you’ve done this a couple of times (or perhaps before Step #3, but definitely not before generating material), it may be time for an outline, especially if you have a longer project. For me, it helps to think of an outline as an aspiration and a way to help grasp “the big picture,” rather than as a directive from my inner dictator. This helps me deviate from and then revise my outline as much as necessary, or disregard it entirely once I know where I’m going and feel confident I can get there without it. (Yes, I am one of those people who often turns off the GPS!)
(5) Going through Step #3 several times–with or without an outline–will likely lead to even more cutting and rearranging, and you may be faced with eliminating a line, an image, or even a whole paragraph or several pages that you really love. It’s a writer’s curse–the idea that you have to “kill your darlings,” a phrase that has been attributed to Allen Ginsberg, William Faulkner, Stephen King, Oscar Wilde, Eudora Welty, G.K. Chesterton, and Chekhov, but was likely coined by the lesser known writer Arthur Quiller-Couch in 1914. But you don’t really need to “kill” those precious bits. Just give all the darlings a good home in a separate file on your computer to be potentially resurrected in another piece. Many of them may never see the light of rebirth, but they’ll still be in your files, and perhaps when you die, your archivist will discover all those unpublished little gems!
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But seriously, what I think is most important here is to have faith that you can get from Point A to Point B, even if you’re not confident in your sense of direction. It just may take you a little longer to find the path. And if you do get lost, make sure to enjoy the walk, rather than worry too much about where it’s taking you.
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