"Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box. Everyone has his or her own organizational system. Mine is a box, the kind you can buy at Office Depot for transferring files. I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me.”
— Twyla Tharp, award-winning dancer, choreographer, and the author of the book The Creative Habit
When you're working on a writing project, it’s important to be able to capture relevant ideas. You’ll think about these ideas in the shower or other random places - typically far from where you ordinarily do your writing.
That’s why it’s so important to have a single, canonical source of truth for possible writing ideas (on a per project basis). If you run a blog, keep a folder in your notebook or computer dedicated to potential blog post ideas. If you are writing a book, make sure you can do the same for each chapter or sub-section. The medium doesn’t matter, and the scale of your writing doesn’t matter - it’s just important that you have one place to put your ideas as they come to you.
Make sure that your storage method lets you add relevant quotes, analogies, etc. If you store not only the ideas “Quilting for Vampire Teenagers,” but the specific sources and ideas you’re thinking of “that passage from Twilight,” half your work will be done by the time you sit down to write! (The hard part, too!)
Take a moment to make sure you’re set up for writing success:
What's next?