There's no such thing as the right or wrong way to write. Some authors plan, outline and track every single detail, and some wing the whole story. And then there’s anything in between. I’ve been embracing chaos for many years and only when I started writing my debut novel I learned how to plan and eventually found my perfect balance. Welcome to my Show and Tell.

Photo by Natalia Y. on Unsplash
I am an exceptionally messy person. And at the same time, I’m a sucker for spreadsheets and certain things being in immaculate order. So you could say I’m selectively messy? That’s probably just a nice way of saying something my mum would say to me when I was a teenager. Anyway. When it comes to writing, my process and habits have come a long way since 2007 when I started, but especially last year when I wrote the first draft of my debut novel. Up until then, ‘planning’ was almost a dirty word to me. Pfft, planning? What for? I’ll just wing it as I go. My usual modus operandi was writing a bunch of random scenes that would eventually come together and… hoping for the best.
And I mean, it worked while I wrote fanfiction. And it works for many people who write actual novels, I’m sure. But shortly after I wrote the first random scenes for my novel, I realised that this system wouldn’t do for such a long story. And that was when my goal was "only" 120k words. The first draft ended up being 144k words long and if I didn’t want to either give up halfway through or curse my past self every day for months when editing, I needed to do some planning. So, naturally, I went crazy the other way to balance things out. Because I wasn’t going to give up on my random scenes.

Let’s take a look at the tools that allowed me to stay messy while being organised and finishing the first draft in 8 short months.
Word count chart
I believe in frequent rewards for small achievements in any form that works well for you. So I designed this simple colourful chart not only to keep track of my speed and make some content for TikTok but to give me small, regular doses of dopamine as well. Every time I post about it I get comments from people who want to use it too and I'm happy to share so feel free to download it here!
Outline
The most basic tool for a writer, yet a new experience for me. The best I did up until then was some basic story notes. Now, however, I wrote a few pages of story points. I used a similar method as when I make puff pastry pizza snails which is what I always recommend to other writers. The beginning and the end need to be determined first. My story starts and ends with an election night. Then there's The Big Plot Twist (roughly) in the middle. You’re left with two large chunks of the story. When you add two more, the parts become much smaller. And so on until the plot points come together. And then a bunch of scenes between these points. Like this, but a lot more and neater. I drew this 5 minutes ago.

Chapter list
When I had my outline and plot points, I wrote a list of chapters (alright, I did it messily at the same time). Just a simple Chapter 1, Chapter 2… I didn’t want to name the chapters, I think it wouldn’t suit the book. The chapters are dated, however. Dates are very important in the story and I used a similar method as with the outline. I determined my beginning and my end, and then, as I distributed the plot points amongst the chapters, I added dates. These changed a bit as I wrote, of course, just like some chapters were merged or scraped. To help me keep track of the dates and key events, I marked all my chapters in a calendar.

This is an updated version that I’m going to use for editing. For writing, I just used a basic colour-coded calendar which showed June to November. The chapter list helped me not to wander away from the plot when I was writing in my typical messy fashion because I was able to work on any chapter that I wanted and know exactly what I was supposed to do.

Progress sheet
Here you can see that I didn’t give up on my sweet mess. When I had my outline and my chapter list, I felt confident jumping all over the place and writing random scenes without worrying about drifting off course too much. The sheet divided my story into 3 acts and helped me keep track of the state of each chapter and their word/page count as well as the overall word/page count of each act and the whole story. And let me tell you, filling each cell with a green ‘Finished’ as the story eventually started coming together and the random scenes formed whole chapters was the most satisfying thing. I’m going to use the same format for my editing and the second draft but here I expect the progress to be more linear (hahahahah even I don’t believe that, I’ll probably jump straight to the Berlin chapters).

Graphs
Since my book is about politics, I needed to mark down the election results, All of them from the date of the oldest flashback, so I made 6 graphs in total. You won't see most of these numbers in the book but looking at the evolution of the political scene in my fictional country was very helpful to my writing process! I made this graph on Flourish (there's every single graph you can think of and it's free, go check it out) and it's the same one that's normally used for election results in my country so it felt nice and symbolic.

Editing notes
After I locked the first draft away for my break, ideas for what to edit and add started flowing in. But of course, I couldn’t keep going back to the doc. That would ruin the whole point of the break, which is to forget what I wrote and look at it with fresh eyes during the first round of edits. At the same time, I’m the kind of person who buys cute hardback notebooks and then doesn’t use them. So, and I recommend this to everyone, I bought a cheap, plain, school notebook that I won’t mind filling with my horrific handwriting. You can see in the picture that I’ve been carrying it with me everywhere for the past few months. It even travelled with me to Glasgow and to visit my family for the holidays. Eventually, I filled half of it with notes and ideas. Then I copied all these notes to a separate doc, divided them into categories and printed them out so I can cross them out as I edit.
I’m very happy with how the first draft turned out and after finishing the editing notes I found that I don’t need to move things around as much as I was afraid. I know that many authors make drastic changes in their second draft. I found a better spot for a few things but I'm not planning any big changes right now. I don't even want to imagine the state of my first draft if I didn't use all of these tools, though. 😅
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