Writing a book diary

Writing is a learning process even if, like me, you’ve got fifteen or sixteen books under your belt. I’m always looking for ways to get more control over my work. Here’s one I came up with recently. Maybe it will work for you.

I just woke up in my hotel room in Bangkok with a (possibly) bright idea about how to improve the opening section of the current work in progress. What do I do with this thought? There are a few options.

• Tell myself I’ll remember it later in the day when I start writing on the WIP again. Not good. I’ll forget
• Make a note somewhere in the actual text of the document.  That’s OK. Have done that for years. It works, but I only see the note when I get to that part of the project.
• Add it to a to-do list for the project somewhere. Again, that’s OK if you look at your to-do list a lot and you’re a list person (I’m not).

Here’s another alternative. Make a note of it in your diary. What diary? The diary you’re keeping about writing the book. I do this now with every work I start. I’m not the only one. The great Gillian Roberts/Judy Greber told me she does the same when we last met at the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference. Judy keeps a paper diary. I’m hopeless with paper so I keep an electronic one using MacJournal ($34.95 from Mariner).

MacJournal is a dead easy piece of software. You set up a journal on your document. You create folders. They you write posts in them. Imagine a little private blog (it can post public blog posts too). Some of those folders are used for research, character and location notes and anything else associated with the project.

But one is a diary, where I note down ideas, concerns and, at the end of every week, a tally of the word count and any general feelings I have about the project. My wake-up thought this morning has gone into that diary already. So I know where to find it and it will stare up at me until I either accept or reject it.

The great thing about keeping a book project diary is that it is outside the book itself. Keeping it separate gives the stuff in there some kind of perspective. It’s a place for logical, methodical maybe boring left brain stuff, not the creative, bonkers, beyond the envelope stuff that the right brain puts into the manuscript. And because it’s a diary it’s organised on the basis of nothing more complicated than time. So I can see how my feelings about the project are changing as it grows and mutates into something hopefully bigger and better than the initial idea.

That’s the way I work these days. Feel free to try it for yourself – and Mariner have a Windows version of that software too.

Related posts:

1. The book diary experiment continues
2. Tools for writing
3. Starting a book – what do you need to know?
4. OneNote for book research: magical in the end
5. Forget book diaries, how about a book blog?