How to Organize a Book

Episode 171: May 23, 2009
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Grammar Girl talks about the difficulties she encountered trying to use a spreadsheet to organize her upcoming book, and explains how paper solved the problem. There is no transcript for this video podcast. This show was not scripted. Please forgive the occasional spoken errors.

Technical details about how we made this video.

Links mentioned in the show:

Kripalu Yoga Retreat
Field's End Writers Conference
Mary Guterson
Free Trial and Free Audiobook at Audible
Grammar Girl's next book, The Grammar Devotional, will be available October 15, 2009.

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Mike Wrenn
6/5/2009 3:56:50 AM

Also consider Tinderbox by Eastgate. It has a map view that lets you type, place and scale your notes. It also organizes notes using agents which consistently search data you enter. It is the swiss army knife of writing, hypertexting and project development.

Darrell
5/29/2009 9:57:58 PM

I'm working on a long research project covering historical events that happen over 15 years of one man's life, and trying to make sense of all the information in spreadsheet form has been a nightmare. The "paper" method was recommended to me by a colleague who used to teach in Seattle (I wonder if there's a connection to Mary Guterson there). I'm going to give it a try.

I suppose another benefit to this method is I will get to physically see (and touch) all of this data at once. I'm sure there will be something in there that I'd long forgotten about.

Thanks to Rachel for the tip on yWriter. I may give that a try too. While I can understand her concern over tree-killing, I'd imagine printing out my stuff once and cutting it up might waste less than printing out numerous disorganized rough drafts.

Finally, your yoga reference reminded me of this ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyhI9QDit9U

Hmm, maybe they have a point. For accounting it might not be such a great idea.

Thanks

Grammar Girl
5/26/2009 10:30:54 AM

We replaced the .mp4 file at iTunes with an .mv4 file, and it seems to be working now.

Grammar Girl
5/25/2009 10:29:38 PM

Thanks for letting us know the video isn't playing on iTunes. We're trying to find the problem.

Nicholas
5/25/2009 7:07:31 PM

I also had a problem with the podcast. Oddly, I could watch it on my iPod but not in iTunes-when I press "Play" in iTunes, it acts as if the podcast isn't even there.

Thanks for having it available here!

dove95
5/25/2009 5:41:26 PM

Along with Chris Murphy, I wasn't able to play the video through iTunes or through my computer file. I was, however, able to view on this site. Not sure why it worked here, but I'm glad I got to see it :)

Chris Murphy
5/25/2009 2:37:22 AM

This week's video podcast will not play for me. I am subscribed to GG through iTunes, and even after I re-downloaded the episode, it still refused to play. I thought you might want to know. There might be other people having the same problem.

Rachel
5/24/2009 11:03:56 PM

Scrivener for the Mac and yWriter for the PC does that and does it very, very well. Scrivener is really great for organizing by such a method with the corkboard. I'm in love with it because I often write books out of order, so I can keep notes with the chapter, shuffle parts, put parts under other parts, and so on. Plus it has a save after a few seconds of not typing feature.

yWriter for the PC does similar things though more difficult to learn initially.

These might not work if you like the physicality of touching paper to organize, but for me since I can put sections under other sections, have multiple novels in the same project, collect data, make notes, label sections, I really love it.

Save some trees in the process...

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