Now that I have my pristine new notebooks ready, my pile of colored gel pens (I love using these, a color for each character), and half an idea in my head for this year’s NaNoWriMo, it’s time to dig out what I call the road maps to successful writing. You wouldn’t take a trip without a road map, would you?
Yes, the books were the first boxes unpacked after our cross-country move, but they were not organized! It’s hard to stay organized when you are constantly moving one pile of stuff to another room and back again. The books I’m speaking of are books on the craft of writing.
So this weekend was spent getting things in order. I’m blessed with a built in bookshelf in my master bedroom which covers a complete wall, so I had plenty of space to work with.
Usually I arrange books by author or genre and then by size.
Sometimes I’ll go back and take out the writing related-but I’m not there yet (like How to Find a Literary Agent, Making the Perfect Pitch) and put them to the side, for future reference. (Like in a couple of years when I’ve sweated through a couple of edits.)
Other times I’ll take the constant go-to reference books (they’re the ones with the bent spines – The Woman in the Story and The Emotional Craft of Fiction comes to mind) and stack them up and browse through them as I pass by on the way to something else.
Or I might just take a few moments to read Stephen King’s On Writing, just to get a master’s anecdotal opinion on the process. (And yes, that’s a Furrby. He’s not quite as annoying as he used to be. Twenty years have worn him down. Now when I wake him up, he says he’s “sleepy” and starts snoring.)
Good thing the weather’s been unusually cold for this time of year. (As in teen-digit weather, brr…) There’s plenty of time to cuddle up with a book and hot cup of tea while I load my brain full of things I should be doing when I write.
🙂
