Saturday, March 7, 2009

Keep track of your drafts (or How to avoid being buried in paper)


A while ago, I posted a link to a video about using OneNote to keep track of notes. At the time, I mentioned that next I would show you how I use OneNote to write poetry.

Here it is:
Poetry notes with OneNote

How did this come about? A group of us were talking about wanting to keep old drafts and then trying to manage all the versions and the stacks of paper. I told about how I'd switched over to using OneNote, and people wanted to know more. I can explain it, and I'm always happy to, but it's so much more convincing in action.

If you've already seen me post this link elsewhere 25 times—well, I'm just pretty excited about it.

What do you think? How do you manage your drafts?

Next up: How to pull all your poems (or chapters or recipes) into a single manuscript, with page numbers and a table of contents and everything.


3 comments:

Dana said...

I have a private blog dedicated to housing all my poems. The top entry in each post is the current version of the poem, with the previous versions in the post below the top entry.

I have everything tagged and categorized so that I can see, for example, what poems go in which chapbook, which ones are published or out being considered for publications, even which ones are humorous and which ones mention Jesus.

I manage all my collaborative writing on this blog as well, and I export the entire site every week so I ahve a backup on my hard drive.

Dana said...

I meant "have," not "ahve."

:)

Joannie Stangeland said...

Wow! Thanks for sharing your process. I especially like the idea of being able to tag things. And I'm guessing that the backup means you can work offline, if you need to.