Creativity Hacker

We all do it, no matter what tool we use. At some point, every writer I’ve ever talked to has developed a technique for embedding editorial notes to self into the manuscript. Even if you use a tool with rich annotation features, like Scrivener or yWriter5, there’s a certain attraction to the simplicity — and unavoidability — of the embedded note.

But all embedments are not created equal. The big fear, of course, is that you’ll forget to remove one, and your readers might actually see it. That of course, would be bad. At the very least, unprofessional, and at the worst, spoiler city or totally embarrassing. Like showing up at the wedding with bachelor party puke in your hair.

To me, though, that risk is entirely why I put my notes there in the first place. I don’t want anything bad reaching my reader, so I know I have a very solid editorial review process in place to make sure that doesn’t happen. There is zero chance that one of these notes will escape attention. And as a happy corollary, that means there is also zero chance that I will forget to act on (or at least consider) the wisdom of the note.

I can already hear you saying that tools like Scrivener already have marvellous places for to make side notes about scenes and notes about the project, notes about the characters, and notes about notes about notes, etc. But in my working practice, all those note-putting-places are a problem, not a solution. There is nothing inherent to the process of publishing the book that ensures I will actually look at those notes and remember to do something about them. What if I put a note in one of those scene note boxes but I then forget to go back and look at those notes? I might forget to implement that really, really important idea. Sure, you can promise yourself that you won’t forget, but frankly, that’s just naive. You WILL one day forget to review them, or you will overlook one of the annotations when you do. It’s human nature. Any system that relies on rigidly followed protocols is just an accident waiting to happen.

And that’s where embedments shine. See, you’re already reading the manuscript. Frequently That’s a given. You have to read it. It’s part of the process of writing and editing. And it’s more than just you, too. It’s every single editor, alpha reader, test reader, and proof reader on your team. Even your grandma. Anyone who reads it before you send it off to publication is acting as a safety net for you. The only way these notes are going to slip through is if you are woefully negligent on the whole editorial quality thing. And if that’s the case, you deserve to have embarrassing notes get through to your reader. You also deserve weasel-infested undergarments, but that’s a topic for another day.

The other issue here is called creative flow — that sense of being in the zone. It’s like the Holy Grail of any art. We are more creative and more productive during that flow phase than at any other time in our lives, so we want to guard it. Jealously. Unfortunately, every interruption threatens to pop us out of that zone. Had a quick thought and don’t want to lose it? Just keep typing. Wrap it in a little bow of [ and ] and then get back to what you were doing. Interruption: minimal. But take your hands off the keyboard, reach for the mouse, find the cursor, jump around to some other file somewhere, click on it, open it, read through it, find the thing you were looking for, make a decision, and maybe write something else, or go yet somewhere else in search of more information? Interruption: colossal. Bye-bye zone time. Embedding notes to self is actually a more creatively efficient practice than dealing with the idea when it pops up, or making notes in some other box or tool somewhere else. The more often you change the focus of what you’re doing, the less efficient you become.

Anyway, assuming you’ve drunk the Koolaid and you now believe, let’s talk about the practical dos and don’t of meta note keeping.

Flagging

First, make sure you flag the notes in a way that will be easy to search for later. I know one writer who signs every such note with his initials. This way, when he’s finished a draft, he can go back and search for any occurrences of his initials, and thereby find all his notes. This works fine, but if your name is Thomas Henry Erikson, you might want to consider a different marking technique. Also, it requires multiple keystrokes, so it’s easy to mistype it and end up making your note invisible to your later searches.

I used to use the initials technique myself, but after having been frustrated by the mistyped initials problem a few times, I opted for something simpler. My current practice is to put the note in square brackets [like this], and also to make the note bold, [like this]. Just run your eyes over this page. See how that text leaps out at you as you’re scanning elsewhere? Very handy. And since I never use square brackets for anything in my writing, this solution is ideal for me. But if you imagine that you might want square brackets in your text one day, pick something else. Curly brace maybe, {like this}? Or maybe ^caret symbols^ or \backslashes\? It doesn’t really matter what you use, so long as it’s something that you won’t use in your normal story prose.

Note Triage

So, now that we’ve talked about how to make the notes, what kinds of suggestions warrant being embedded in the first place? In my view, everything. Well, almost everything. If I’m reading through a scene and notice that I’ve spelled “the” as “teh”, I don’t make a note about it. I change it on the spot, but anything that I’m either not sure about yet, or don’t want to take the time to do now, gets embedded.

Some notes demand changes that are a bit more labor intensive. Consider this one: [Go back and be sure the villain actually had the Wand of Smiting in his possession before you have him pull it out of his pocket now.] See, I’m writing the epic battle scene now and I need McBaddie to have that wand, but did he pick it up during the earlier donkey attack scene? I forget. So now I have a dilemma. Do I go look that previous scene up now? Or do I just drop a note here, reminding myself to check later, and just keep writing? Sometimes I go one way, sometimes the other. If I’m really in the zone, I’ll just drop the note there and keep writing. But if I know I can find the donkey attack easily, I might just take a moment now to confirm. And if I do go back to read the donkey scene and find that he DIDN’T pick it up, then I’ll either add that detail to the donkey scene now, or I’ll add a reminder note there. [Have McBaddie pick up the Wand after the donkeys retreat, because I want him to wield it in the epic battle later.]

So we’ve seen that some notes are too trivial to bother making, but is there any such thing as too important a note? In my view, no. There’s a trick many programmers learn to help write a complicated program. Instead of writing code, you start by writing a series of comments, where each comment represents a step in breaking that complexity down into smaller chunks. Then you use those comments as notes to self, and begin writing the code for each step under each of those comments, eventually filling out the entire complex program.

I take a similar approach to my writing. Whether you’re a pantser or a plotter, there are times in your writing journey where you know there will be a scene coming up later. You might decide on the epic battle as part of your outline, or you might only realize its inevitability when you’re writing the donkey attack. Either way, when I know I’ll need a scene later, I create the scene file, and then drop an embedded note in the file, describing what I need. [In this epic battle scene, McBaddie will whip out his Wand of Smiting, but after a long speech about his superior intellect, it will fail, because he doesn’t know that Donkey Hootie accidentally swallowed the Orb of Negation.]

As other scenes get written, and new threads pop up that might have relevance to the epic battle, I’ll jump to that scene and add those thoughts as notes. [Don’t forget to have Donkey Hootie hiccup once or twice at the beginning of the scene, to remind everybody that he’s still got that damned golden golf ball lodged in his throat.]

By the time I get to the epic battle scene, most of what needs to happen, and the necessary embellishing details are already there in note form. Now all I do is write the scene. If I’m able to cover all the details specified in the notes, then I delete the notes. They’ve been handled, and are no longer needed. If any details haven’t been dealt with yet, I’ll leave those bits there to be handled later.

So as you can see, notes to self can be of almost any scope.

Revising Process

Once you’ve started making your notes this way, you can easily scan the entire project using your search tools to find all your embedded notes. In addition to being a working To Do list, this also serves as a fairly reliable barometer of how much work you have left. When you’ve actually made the changes suggested in a note, just delete it. And as you encounter new issues, add notes in appropriate places.

Over time, the notes will become increasingly picky, and at some point, you may decide that what seemed important when you made the note is just not significant enough to care about now. [Was the Wand of Smiting black or was it steely grey?] If you reject a note as no long relevant, just delete it, since you no longer plan to implement it.

The project isn’t done until all embedments have either been implemented and deleted, or reconsidered and deleted. Either way, when your search comes back empty, you’re done.

Special Notes

There are a few specific kinds of embedments that I find myself making often enough that I’ve developed a sort of shorthand vocabulary for them. Your “high frequency” note categories might be different from mine, but I’ll include them to give you a sense of the variety of ways you can use them.

Backplant: These occur when I’m writing a scene and something that happens now raises a need to go back to insert some new detail or fact in a previous scene. In my epilogue scene, Donkey Hootie brays and stomps the floor, and the pile of dirty dishes that have been on the counter all through the story, finally collapses. Everyone laughs. It’s a nice, light beat to end on. The only problem is, there never were any dishes mentioned in previous scenes. I only just now realized the need for that kind of light concluding moment, so I’ve just made the whole thing up on the spot. Enter, the backplant note: [Backplant Hootie getting called to his adventure while doing the dishes.]

Survey: Frequently, I’ll realize something about a character or a story arc late in the process — something that needs to be evident throughout the book. When writing the epilogue scene, I realize that Donkey Hootie is not a hero. He’s just an irritable house-donkey who’s trying to set the world back to rights so he can get back and finish the dishes. [Survey – Hootie displays irritation whenever the adventure gets more complicated, and mentions “There go the dishes” or “Great. Now there’ll be flies to deal with, too.”]

Style: Often, I’ll find myself questioning issues of capitalization, punctuation, etc. I want my MS to be as clean as possible, so I need to remember to make a decision about such things, but I don’t really want to take the time to research it right now. [Style: is it my Lord or My Lord.] And as a pro tip, once I’ve made these decisions, I keep a Style Guide file in the project where I make notes about all of these stylistic decisions, and my reasons, so I can hand that off to my editor when I submit the MS. This allows them to see my thinking on all of these little stylistic issues, and simplifies the process of bringing them up to speed. But sometimes, I’m in the zone and don’t want to break away to update the Style guide. So that’s when I’ll drop a quick embedment and keep going. [Style: use King when talking about the man or the job title, and king when talking about the concept. Dave hoped one day to become King. Bob was not a very good king.]

Timeline: Unless you have a very unusual story, there are going to be some characters off screen at some times, and some activities happening elsewhere that bear on your plot. This means that you will often have questions about whether such and such happened before or after some other thing. That’s where a simple timeline embedment is called for. [Timeline: = Donkey Doffkey crushes the amulet.] This is my way of saying that the events happening here must take place at the same time as that other event, over there, and that I need to confirm that the passage of days and hours mentioned in the prose doesn’t conflict with these intended alignments. Similarly, [Timeline: < that event] suggests that the scene here happens before events there at that event.

There are other kinds of notes you can make, of course. How you use them is entirely up to you, and you’ll develop your own language for them as you get more comfortable.

So if you haven’t tried them before, take embedded notes around the block for a spin. At first, it’ll feel like you’re cheating or something, because it’s just too damned easy. Isn’t keeping track of all your loose threads and thoughts supposed to be more difficult than this?

No. It’s really not.