Several posts ago when I began to share my writing process, I explained that I had saved my journals from our homeschooling days. I went through all of them—about twenty—and typed into a Word doc any entries that I thought might be useable for my book. I plunked them in whatever chapter I thought they could work but in no particular order. The result was a very rough start of my manuscript at about 55,000 words.
Today I will explain my approach to organizing all those entries into some kind of rational order. For some of the chapters, it was easy to move entries around in a sequence that made sense for conveying the topic. But with at least two chapters, there are so many entries that it was unwieldly to organize them on my computer screen. So I went back a few decades to my early college days.
When I started college right out of high school, computers were rare at school and personal computers were still uncommon. This makes me sound old, but it was only forty years ago. When a research paper was assigned, I went to the library, read books, and took notes by hand usually on one side of the paper. As I delved into my topic, the keys points would rise to the surface, revealing the shape of my paper. But like my journals, my notes were not in any real order, just taken down as I encountered ideas.
Once I had done enough research, I sat down with a pair of scissors and separated the ideas by cutting the pages. Then I laid them out on a table and moved my slips of notes around until I established the content I would use for my key points. As a visual learner, this worked really well for me. Then I sat down at a typewriter and began to write. One semester while studying abroad I even used a manual typewriter. Now I really sound like a dinosaur.
Old tried-and-true methods can still serve well. I have brought back the original cut-and-paste method while writing my book for the chapters that have so many journals entries that I can’t possibly sort them on my computer. Having set up a folding table, I spread out my slips of paper to discover the chapter’s themes. And so far, it has worked really well. Just a small glimpse into this writer’s process.
I leave you with a view of the Grand Canyon from the North Rim taken two years ago before the devastating fires.