How do you organize?

sanctuary6284 · Apr 5, 2008

Since I'm asking this to mostly scifi/fantasy authors I assume this is the place to ask.

How do you organize all your worldbuilding info?

I've been typing everything up in word but the interface drives me nuts, especially when I want to refer quickly to something.

I have used OneNote once or twice and I was thinking that maybe I should type this all in there. I don't know so I'm looking for all kinds of suggestions.

PS. I would personally love my own desktop version of a wiki but I don't think they make those.

badducky · Apr 5, 2008

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=79297

That's my way.

Plot Device · Apr 5, 2008

I percolate a lot of data in my head. I percolate it for many months, really.

I rarely find the need to write down my cosmology, but I definitely do find the need to:

a) write down the details of places and the distances between them (especially travel distances and line-of-sight distances) --often this results in my drawing a map
b) chart the progression of my plot points on some kind of a story graph
c) make a viable calendar/timeline of events

The last one in particular I find I wrestle with the most. Timelines need to totally jive for me. Such as, I started outlining this one story (didn't start writing it yet, just outlining) that was supposed to be six months, then re-outlined it so that it all collapsed down to just six weeks, then stretched it out to nine weeks, then scrunched it down to five weeks and settled on five weeks from then onward.

My cosmology with the rules of magic --complete with the powers, abilities,and limitations of my creatures, and the historical backgrounds of all the races as well as of the individual characters-- tends to be the most organic and effortless aspect of any one of my stories.

Plot Device · Apr 5, 2008

Hye badducky, I just got done reading your advice thread. I like the excel spreadsheet thing. I should try it sometime for some of my own organizational challenges.

But I disagree with one bit of advice you gave:

Don't brainstorm into the messageboard. It's a bad idea. It won't help you.

Actually I often times find it DOES help. I get electrified when I bounce an idea off the boards, get a suggestion or two from fellow writers, and then find inspiration from totally off in left field.

Sage · Apr 5, 2008

I write it into the novel. If I add to it or change something later on, I either go back and change right away or get it in edits. That's it

(Note: Most of my stuff is contemporary)

Richard White · Apr 5, 2008

Depending on what I'm doing, I tend to have multiple folders under each WIP where I've done descriptions of characters to include specific events in their past that may come up. For my fantasy works, I also create calendars, monetary systems, lists of gods/religions and which country worships which gods, approximate costs of items that might become important later in the story, etc.. I print those out and keep them in notebooks on my shelf and refer to them as necessary.

For my military SF, I've used a Quatro Pro spreadsheet to keep track of what vehicles are in which troop, any names associated with any specific vehicle (to include rank) as well as the vehicle call signs.

Other stories require different amounts of background material, but I find 80% of it winds up being a word perfect document that gets added to as I go along to keep from having to read back four chapters to remember what I named X ship or X town or X crew member. (Names of islands when you have over 400 of them in the archipelago your privateers are sailing through demands a list of some kind - just to keep spelling straight if nothing else.)

Of course, not everyone is quite as ana . . . I mean as organized as I am when it comes to world building.

Ruv Draba · Apr 6, 2008

sanctuary6284 said:
Since I'm asking this to mostly scifi/fantasy authors I assume this is the place to ask.

How do you organize all your worldbuilding info?

I use a product called Liquid Story Binder. It has lots of ways to organise things. For places I usually create a dossier which is a sort of structured document template. It might have a picture, a place-name, with notes on territory, population, government, law & order, traffic, technology, location, landscape, weather, architecture, trade, highlights and notable hazards. I usually give the dossier a structured name (e.g. PL-Koozbane) so I can find all the places easily. If your places are all part of a bigger place (e.g. a country or world), you can associate them with the other places.

I do the same things with cultural notes, character notes etc... Sometimes I write narrative about characters, places or cultures too - not narrative that necessarily makes it into a story, but stuff that I find interesting or inspirational in its own right. These ideas go into unstructured documents that I associate with various dossiers.

By the end I have a very structured arrangement of reference material that I can sort through quickly and easily.

I find the software quite good, but if you want to use a similar approach without paying anything, I know a few people who do it using a wiki. Other than cost, the key benefit is that you can also share and collaborate on material easily. (On the other hand, Liquid Story Binder helps you a bit with manuscripts too...)

PS. I would personally love my own desktop version of a wiki but I don't think they make those.

They sure do! Try these links to personal wikis. I can't recommend any in particular, but doubtless other AWers might.

Linda Adams · Apr 6, 2008

Mine's an urban fantasy, so I'm not doing as much with the world building. But I got Office Enterprise and have been using One Note to keep any notes. Once I started getting into, I found it was pretty good. I can create a single tab, like the name of a House, and then have multiple pages under. Think of it like having pockets in a notebook. You have a pocket labeled for each of your classes, and when you get notes from that class, you stick it in the appropriate pocket.

JimmyB27 · Apr 6, 2008

sanctuary6284 said:
How do you organize all your worldbuilding info?

Sorry, I'm not familiar with this concept. Could you please elaborate?

kct webber · Apr 6, 2008

My office looks kind-of like Katrina blew through it. But I know exactly where everything is. That's how I organize. Old scraps of paper. Tissues. Notebooks. 3x5 cards...

Maybe I should look at some of the links in this thread, huh?

oscuridad · Apr 6, 2008

As I am a mac user I use Scrivener. Really nice piece of software.

The Grump · Apr 6, 2008

Organized? Are you kidding? It's one thing to have a plan and another to do it.

For what it's worth, my plan: I develop ideas with pen/pencil on paper. Then use lots and lots of those binder index pages to organize the various aspects of the book project in a binder.

As for organizing your world, I suggest looking at a couple anthropology books in the library and write down the chapter headings: ie social organization, food technology, religon, government, ecology, etc. Set up sections for them.

I find keeping all this stuff in a huge binder keeps each book project organized. And it works ... when I do it.

ChaosTitan · Apr 6, 2008

Plot Device said:
Actually I often times find it DOES help. I get electrified when I bounce an idea off the boards, get a suggestion or two from fellow writers, and then find inspiration from totally off in left field.

I don't want to drag this back into an old argument/discussion, but there is a difference between on-board brainstorming to loosen up a stuck idea, and using the board as your personal "look at me, isn't this idea awesome!" blog.

We've had both, and I have no objections to the former. It's the latter that tends to annoy fellow board members.

Back on topic...

I mostly write UF, but I don't really have a system for worldbuilding. Most of my notes are in spiral notebooks. I'll sketch city maps and locations, keep pages on different species, make a note of how certain things (like magic or powers or whatever) work. Character notes.

I don't know why, but I like leafing throw loose pages of paper to find information. Much better than scrolling through a computer program.

Lccorp2 · Apr 6, 2008

I keep in all in my mind, but I do cheat a little--many of the "rules" of the world I'm working in work on a langton's ant-esque system.

Pthom · Apr 6, 2008

I write SF, mostly stuff that's far enough in the future as to require a measure of world building, or takes place elsewhere from Earth and that too needs world building.

I'm with badducky in that I find a digital spreadsheet (either Excel or Calc) to be most convenient for locating and sorting data. I do keep all my characterizations in a Word document because I started producing them as narratives. I've since changed to a tabular format but because I had already macros and such like set up in Word, I haven't moved them to Excel (but I could, easily).

Maybe the best thing about the spreadsheet for my purposes is that I can work out plotline time and date details in just a few key strokes. That is I can now. It did take me some many long hours initially, to work out the formulae to make it all go right.

The Grump · Apr 7, 2008

The spreadsheet idea is good, but I'd like to add a caution.

We were recently slammed. I was without phone service and computer access for almost three weeks while we tried to get our old number back. (Unsuccessful.) Not only did I lose my DSL, but for some strange Microsoft reason, I couldn't access Word.

I'd print out the spread sheet regularly in case something unusual happens so you could still refer to it. (I assume you'd still write even though you didn't have access to a computer.)

sanctuary6284 · Apr 7, 2008

Thanks for all these great ideas. Ruv Draba, thanks for the link. There was definately some useful stuff there. I think I know some really good ways to organize now. I'll definately print the stuff out. Don't want to lose it all suddenly or not have access to it.

JimmyB27 · Apr 7, 2008

sanctuary6284 said:
I'll definately print the stuff out. Don't want to lose it all suddenly or not have access to it.

Nooo - think of the trees!

badducky · Apr 7, 2008

Back up with many things. Paper is a poor choice, in general, for environmental and economic reasons (you'd be amazed how pricey it can get to print, store, and keep clean so many different versions of stuff when you're really developing a backlist.)

I recommend Flash Drives. I've got a few of them floating around. Also, I e-mail things to myself at G-Mail.

Ruv Draba · Apr 7, 2008

badducky said:
Back up with many things. Paper is a poor choice, in general, for environmental and economic reasons (you'd be amazed how pricey it can get to print, store, and keep clean so many different versions of stuff when you're really developing a backlist.)

It depends on how long you want to archive for. Digital storage is notoriously bad for storing things past a decade or so. Magnetic and optical media can deteriorate over these time-frames (iron oxide can crumble away, the laminar coding on CDs can become opaque, plastics can become brittle) but worst of all is that the rate of change of technology can mean that your old media won't be readable in a decade or two.

Paper is actually one of our most reliable backup materials - especially if you use durable ink on low acidity papers and keep them in a cool, dry, dark place away from pests. It's just not especially cheap or efficient.

From an environmental perspective, consider too that paper is actually carbon sequestration. If the paper doesn't burn or rot then it's actually a sink for CO[SUB]2[/SUB] - and cutting down a tree makes room for another tree. (Just make sure that your paper is from farmed trees, not old growth forest, and uh... ensure that the forestry industry runs on ethanol and the pulp mill runs on hydroelectric. :tongue

)

Sassee · Apr 7, 2008

Don't forget Free Mind. Best program evar. Yes, evar.

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Etola · Apr 9, 2008

I've actually been happy using [a href="[URL="http://www.literarymachine.com/"]www.literarymachine.com[/URL]"]Literary Machine[/a]. Granted, the version I have is a few years old so I can't vouch for the latest version, but it's freeware, and it's been useful in keeping track of notes that I would otherwise have no place to put. Things like short character descriptions, scene ideas, concepts I'd like to expand on, etc. The version I have isn't particularly useful for large blocks of text (it kind of defaults everything to a .txt file, and I prefer Word), but it's possible a more recent version improves on this.

Anything larger, I just put down in word files and organize them into the same folder. It's sometimes hard to remember where certain info is, but that's what the "Search" feature is for

Matera the Mad · Apr 9, 2008

I hve this wonderful thing called a computer. It has an operating system with a marvelous feature called a "file system" which allows me to save a lot of different files in a hierarchy of nested categories called "folders" or "directories'. Using a wonderful piece of software called a file manager, I can browse around through a collection of saved webpages, texts, PDFs, and whatnot (even Word docs!) and find bits that I want. Nerrr.....I also cheat and stash some stuff in Treepad and suchlike things LOL

geardrops · Apr 9, 2008

One long file with lots of headers such as "Government Structure" and "Educational System" and "Basic Economics."

I call said file "Notes."

Ruv Draba · Apr 9, 2008

Matera the Mad said:
I hve this wonderful thing called a computer. It has an operating system with a marvelous feature called a "file system" which allows me to save a lot of different files in a hierarchy of nested categories called "folders" or "directories'.

This is actually very sensible! But there are several possible down-sides for creative thought: it requires you to be well-organised from the outset (and you might not even know what material you're producing when you start); it's not great at controlling versions or complex dependencies and relationships; and it's only mediocre at letting you reuse or reorganise material you've written (good at making spare copies; bad at relinking and reassembly).

When you don't have a lot of material though.. or when it's developed for a single purpose, and organisable in a simple, hierarchical fashion, the technique called 'filing system' seems to work pretty well! I use it for most of my shorts (stories, I mean - I use a different 'filing system' for underwear).

How do you organize?

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