100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Organize your material
Nine ways to overcome writer’s block

Certainly there is such a thing as being overorganized. Some writers organize their material so thoroughly that everything they write comes out looking like a hardware catalog. Your outline, whatever its form, should contain enough slack for creativity and space for new thoughts on your subject.

But you should organize the material. Organizing will help lock in the logic of what you say, and it will speed the writing process. Organizing will help to create an overall unity in your story as well as several interior unities.

There is no one right way to organize material for a story. Organization depends on the nature of the work and, more importantly, on what works for you. So I cannot offer you the best way to organize material. But I will give you a few tips:

· Create a list of questions about your subject before you begin research, and keep related questions together. Go to many different sources for answers—even go to many sources for answers to a single question. Several answers to the same question are compelling when they are similar and fascinating when they are not.

· Gather much more material than you will use. Just as high water pressure makes more water flow faster, the greater weight of material you have gathered will make the words flow faster.

· As you create written material, whether you are photocopying at the library, transcribing taped interviews, or simply scribbling notes, write on one side of the paper only. That way you can slice up your material with a pair of scissors and rearrange it any way you want. While there are many computer programs to help writers organize and edit, you might be one who prefers to print out and work on hard copy.