Writing Tips for Organizing Writing Projects

I’m a pretty organized person. Over the years, I have spent countless hours re-organizing everything from the kitchen cupboards to my clothes-packed closet. Now, I’m turning all that organizing into a set of writing tips that you can use to get organized too.

It’s actually a process I enjoy and people look at me strangely whenever I offer to help them reorganize their garage. Who knows how much time I’ve spent organizing all the pieces of writing I’ve generated?

Basically, all of my writing exists in two formats: print and digital. Years ago, I kept hard copies of everything, and tried many methods from file folders to binders.

As I tried each organizational method, I would figure out what worked well and what didn’t work at all. Now, most of my work is stored digitally, but I do still keep some old hard copies handy.

Since I put so much thought into how I organized my own projects, I thoughts I’d share my organizational writing tips so you can learn from all my hard work.

Writing Tips for Organizing Printed Material

After trying many different strategies for organizing hard copies, I realized that binders are the way to go. Why?

• You can purchase thick 3-5″ binders and cram in as much as possible.
• Organizing is easy with tabbed dividers.
• The pages go in and out easily by opening the rings.
• Clear-cover binders can be customized with fancy spine and cover inserts.
• There are a host of binder accessories available from bags that hold pens and pencils to folders that you can clip in to hold pages that aren’t hole-punched.

Eventually, more and more of what I’d written was in the digital format. The material in my binders became dated and being environmentally conscious, I started opting to do regular electronic backups over the antiquated print method.

Writing Tips for Organizing Electronic Files

I’ve struggled with how to organize my electronic writing folder. For some reason, printed materials are easier to group and label. But using subfolders, I’ve been able to create sensible directories that make it easy to find anything and everything I’ve written.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

• Notes and Ideas – a collection of notes that I’ve typed from my college days, story ideas,  brainstorming sessions, and writing tips I’ve saved.
• Completed Works – ready to be sent out or posted.
• In Progress – anything that is not polished, with subfolders:
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Non-fiction
  • Scripts
• Journals and Freewrites – pretty self-explanatory and very password protected
• Blogs and Internet – copies of my blog posts and related notes.
• Feedback – feedback and critiques that I have given and received.
• Publish and Submission – copies of work that I’ve submitted along with a spreadsheet for tracking submissions.
• Research for Writing Projects – information that I’ve found online, and have copied and pasted into Word because I think it might come in handy someday for one of my projects.

I reorganize this whole mess about once a year. I just went through it a couple weeks ago and did a little fall cleaning, and I found that this system works well for keeping files where I can find them quickly and easily.

Tell me, how do you keep your writing files organized? Share your organizational writing tips in the comments!