How do you...
Tue, 2006-09-05 12:49
#1
How do you...
Howdy, I've just joined up here, and was wondering how others, well, organize their thoughts. Some of you are lucky enough to be able to write stories, whereas myself, I only seem to come up with snippets of, well mostly verbiage. I have reams of short paragraphs and one-liners. How have you all managed to organize it, if you indeed felt the need. Any advice or crit would be appriciated.
archergirl
Hiya, welcome to the forums. Stephen King once wrote a short story about a guy who 'collected' graffiti from toilet stalls on his travels. I thought it was a brilliant idea.
I suppose you could always organise your stuff into various categories: by subject, broadly speaking ('Metaphysics', 'Snow', 'Cars', whatever); or by mood ('hacked off', melancholy, etc.), or by length (short, paragraph, one-liners, etc.). I mean, there are an infinite variety of ways in which you can do this. I would suggest that you simply organise it in a way that makes the most sense *to you*, so you can refer back to them should you need to. There's no reason why an entire book couldn't be compiled this way.
Snowvent
Yeah...it's funny, I was just reading Chekhov's "A Boring Story" and came across some similar sentiments that I've been dealing with...how the professor can identify any ruling idea to reign in his scattered thoughts. I've personally always prefrerred short stories and prose poems to novels. Life happens nothing like a novel. It's the fragmentary in life that keeps us interested. I don't place a high value on "making sense", however I can't abide with those who strain to not make sense...yeah, I'm rambling