How to untangle your thoughts and plots

Hello there, and welcome to a blog post I have no idea if anyone but me will find useful! But I’m doing it anyway.

The writing community has divided themselves into Plotters, Pansters and the in-between Planster, though it is true many of us a mixed races here. I personally have found that planning everything out in detail does not work for me at all (and I have two terrible book drafts to prove it). But I’ve also found that when working on larger projects I simply cannot keep everything in my head. I keep coming up with things that I need to change in a chapter far behind me, or that I need to look something up to remember how exactly I worded it in the last book. Keeping track of all these things either gave me a headache, made me go back to fix it right away (and thereby losing the flow), or made me hate myself and feel like a complete failure. And it has taken me so long to come up with a system that works for me, so in case there is anyone else out there who share in this frustration I am going to share the method that saved my writing sanity.

Now, before you start commenting “why didn’t you just take notes?” let me just say: notes usually need to be sorted somehow to make sense. I have found that if I wrote in a notebook I could not get rid of the notes I no longer needed and it cluttered up the notebook and made it harder to find the things I did need. I also could not rearrange the notes once they were written in there. If I wrote the notes on my phone I could edit them, but I would also lose track of them in the sheer magnitude (currently have 221 notes stored). If I wrote them on my computer I would again lose the flow because I would have to shift documents. This left both my head and desk looking something like this (please don’t judge me).

Okay, to be completely honest, my desk still looks like that now (since I took that picture five minutes ago) – but my head is no longer cluttered, and that’s the important thing!

Now, let me tell you, I have tried whiteboards, I have tried printing out important notes or drawing charts by hand, but the solution I am no going with is by far the cheapest and simplest, and most organized I have ever been. This is now the wall above my desk.

Materials: twelve nails, a bit of string, and some paperclips or tiny pegs to hang the notes with. I now have one horizontal line for each book of my five books series plus a line for the short stories that go along with the books. I can easily reorder the lines since they are all exactly the same length and can simply be unhooked from their nails. Since the lines are double I have both a line for plot ideas (conveniently rearrangeable) and a line for things I mentioned earlier on that I need to remember. I even have one vertical line for things that will be important throughout every book.

Now, you might not think it to look at this, but I’m an organizer. I color code everything (seriously, I have different colors assigned to DVD genres in my closet). So I prefer having these cute little pegs to hang my notes with. Wooden is for “remember this”, purple is for “here’s an idea”, blue is for other stuff, and all the green ones lying in the bottom is for “this is now completed” and those I attach at the bottom of a note to give myself a pad on the back that I managed something. I even have a tiny string on my desk now with blog posts ideas, and at the bottom of each one there is room for 6 pegs – one for having done the research, done the writing,  edited, found a featured image, scheduled and made pins for the post. I can tell you, looking at those green pegs pile up on the string next to me is a great feeling.

My favorite things about this method is that I can now throw out notes as they become outdated or I change my mind, and I don’t have to ruin a notebook to do it. I can easily sort and rearrange plot points. I have everything visible in front of me, all I have to do is look up. The downside, of course, is that I can’t take it with me. On the other hand I mostly write right there at my desk (or the floor next to my desk, but either way in sight of my wall), and the few times I do go out to write somewhere else I can take the most important notes off the lines and bring them with me. If I wasn’t burdened with a tilted wall I could even have fit more strings on it (as it is I have to space them so 1) they don’t brush against the top of my head, and 2) so they don’t put each other in shadow). It is not a perfect system, but it has done so much for decluttering my mind and allowing me to focus on the creative part of writing instead of the insecurity of having a hundred “need to be fixed”‘s bouncing off the sides of my skull and echoing me to insanity.

So what do you think? Do you have a better solution? Could this maybe give you some inspiration as to how to declutter your own mind? Or will you straight up copy this? Feel free to @ me in a picture of your writing space, I am @CKjaerL on both Twitter and Instagram. Till next time then, and I hope you have a wonderful day.