Tips on How To Bring Order To Your Writing

Writing is often a chaotic and messy process. Often we have so many ideas that we end up drowning in a pile of half written sentences, scraps of paper, and middle of the night thoughts that we have sleepily scribbled on a book cover and now only partially make sense. So how do you create order from the chaos? Collating all your bits and pieces of ideas can be tricky, but if you can find a system that works for you to weed out all your creative flotsam and jetsam you will find it so much easier to pick out the great ideas from the nonsense, and hopefully then begin to turn them into a brilliant piece of work. Here are some great tips to help you bring order to your writing .

Create a space for your chaos

A ‘chaos board’ works really well for this. It could be a notice board where you can stick up all your scraps of paper, sticky notes, and whatever else you have used to scribble on, or a blackboard, or just stick some large sheets of paper up on your wall. Use this to to capture your writing ideas, develop characters or note down observations, sentences or words which you might want to use in your writing at a later date. Having all these in one place, and a place where you can see them all together at a glance will help you order them together. Spend some time moving them around and see what relates to what, and which ideas you can pull together and expand on.

Free write

Often when trying to make sense of an idea it can be a tough task trying to put pen to paper and phrase it exactly as you would like. Free writing is a great way to simply let go and let your imagination run wild. To do this sit down and start writing. Write whatever comes into your head and don’t stop. If you can’t think of something to write simply keep repeating the last word over and over until you get going again. Free writing is simply about getting us used to writing without that unhelpful inner critique looming over us. Look back over your free writing once a week and pick out anything useful from the stream of consciousness. You will be amazed at how many little gems you will find.

Draft, re-draft, and then re-draft again

Your first draft is never going to be your final piece, no matter how good you think it is. Writing is a craft and it takes practice to perfect it. You should always let yourself write freely at first. Then leave it for at least a day before you look at it again. Bringing order to your writing is all about letting yourself go, and then reigning yourself back in, sentence by sentence. The pause here is important. If you spend hours on end fretting over your work trying to perfect it, cutting sentences here, changing bits of the story there, you could end up making it into more of a mess. Always allow yourself time to reflect before you go back to your story. A fresh mindset will help you look at it objectively and clearly see what works and what doesn’t.

Writing chaotically is part of the fun of being a writer, letting your imagination run wild and allowing yourself be in a place where anything goes can potentially be very therapeutic. However one of the most rewarding times is when you sit down and work through the chaos.  When you find those ideas that excite you, that give you that little spark, that nervous flutter that makes you think you may just be onto something really rather good. 

Bethany Cadman -Author & Contributor

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