E56 – Taking and Storing Notes

Show Notes

The Revision Wizards podcast episode 56 explores note-taking and storage methods for writers. The three hosts share their individual approaches to notetaking, which include using Scrivener, OneNote, handwritten notes, and other applications. They discuss when and how they use notes in their writing and editing processes, as well as their preferences for keeping or discarding notes once they have served their purpose. The hosts also debate the merits of different methods, from digital organization to physical hoarding, and discuss the challenges of remaining organized.

The Revision Wizards are at https://www.revisionwizards.com
V.E. Griffith’s website: https://www.vegriffith.com
Miss Catherine M.H.’s website: https://www.scribes-pen.com
Lon’s Twitter/X: @lonvarnadore1
Lon’s Instagram: @lon_scribbler

Transcript at: https://revisionwizards.com/?p=2633

Transcript

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m Miss Catherine MH, and I’m joined by my two wacky wizard co-hosts.

[V.E. Griffith]
I’m VE Griffith, and this is episode number 56.

[Lon Varnadore]
And I’m Lon Varnadore, and we’ll be talking about how to keep and use notes while writing and editing.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Woohoo! So let’s start with, um, when we’re writing our own books, how do you take notes? So I’ll ask you guys, where do you take notes when you’re writing?

[Lon Varnadore]
That’s what my writing is.

[V.E. Griffith]
I take notes in Scrivener.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
All right. So we’ve got a Scrivener, evil. We have just writing the book and I will take notes, um, anywhere on anything.

So if I’ve got paper near me, I’m writing it on that paper. Um, and most of the time my notes, aren’t things like, Hey, this is a section of the book. It’s like random brain ideas that pop up.

Or I’m doing that, you know, word scramble thing where you’re explaining to someone your book and you’re writing it down on a page and it doesn’t make sense to anybody who’s looking at the page, but you.

[V.E. Griffith]
Oh yeah. And then two weeks later, when you come back to your note, it doesn’t make sense to you either.

[Lon Varnadore]
You’re like, what?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
You know, I have one of those pages. Oh, and it’s got math equations on it for my sci-fi, which is how I like, I went through and figured out all of the equations to make sure that my ship was like scientifically viable. And I went back cause I was going to like change something on the ship.

Be like, I wrote that equation down. No, I didn’t write the equation. I wrote just numbers on the page from when we put in the equation on the computer.

[Lon Varnadore]
Oops.

[V.E. Griffith]
So it sounds to me, Ms. Catherine, like your note taking system doesn’t actually work.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
It does. Cause I’ll remember the stuff.

[Lon Varnadore]
Eventually.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Cause like I’ve written it down.

[V.E. Griffith]
But if you’re getting incomprehensible numbers that don’t help you, how does that work? You had to redo all the work.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Oh no, no, no. So I know what the numbers go to. It’s I wanted to change the dimensions of the ship.

So I wanted the new numbers, but I don’t remember the equation I used to get the original numbers.

[V.E. Griffith]
Yeah. So it doesn’t work for you. You have to go back and do that work again and find that equation.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
No, I just made the ship stay the same. I was like, it’s already the size of the Empire State Building. I don’t need to change it any differently.

[V.E. Griffith]
So Lon, how do you keep your stuff organized?

[Lon Varnadore]
Uh, organized, organized. I literally just write as I’m writing. If I get some idea for, Oh, this is how something’s going to go a little bit later on, I’ll just sort of hit page break and then write that.

And if I need to, I can go back and I’ll start working toward where those two kind of those ideas might come together. And if not, then I just sort of skip both and go on to where the story sort of goes in my head. That’s all first draft stuff.

So it’s like, and yeah, I mean, I do have a large amount of just half written scribbled notebooks everywhere in my house. Like if you look, there’s probably every notebook has probably at least a half dozen pages written in it and they’ll be numbered for the most part that be like dated. And sometimes it’ll be years.

Like I’ve, I found one little book, one thing here, one little, uh, little, uh, Crest journal thing that starts in 2021. And then in 8-8-2021, and then 1-26- 22, then 11-27-24. And then the most recent is 2-24-25.

So yeah.

[V.E. Griffith]
Sounds like quite the system.

[Lon Varnadore]
Oh yes.

It’s, it’s very, it’s very much an ideal situation for me.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
What about you?

[V.E. Griffith]
I only write about one thing at a time, so I can keep all my notes in Scrivener. I’ve got a research folder. Yeah, I know you love Scrivener.

I keep a research folder in Scrivener and it’s got things like written notes that I have made. It’s got pictures that I’ve used for inspiration to depict my characters or their environment. Scrivener also has its own note feature.

So I can add a note to an individual scene if I want to and attach it to the scene. I can create versions of the scene. So as I edit, I make a snapshot.

I have the old version of the scene. I can roll back if I want to. I can move forward if I want to.

I can see what changes I’ve made. The other thing that I make a lot of use of is called inline annotation, which is Ctrl Shift A or Command Shift A if you’re on a Mac. And with that, it highlights what I type in red so that it’s visually different from my, from my regular typing.

And so I can leave a note to myself in text and it stands out, you know, hey, put here a description of whatever and I can’t miss it because it’s red. But the nice thing about that is I can, when I go to compile, those notes automatically fall out. They don’t compile.

They aren’t included in the Word doc when I compile. So I don’t have to go back and take them out. I can just leave them if I want to, or if it’s incomplete, if I forget one, if I miss one, then the description won’t be there, but there won’t be a note saying, go fix this that the reader is going to see.

[Lon Varnadore]
But isn’t there some like master documents you could have with either Scrivener or when you put it into a text file or something and some like master file that you have? That has all of the notes and everything.

[V.E. Griffith]
And I think, I think in Scrivener, you can export the notes individually or you can, you can export the notes. I don’t like to do that. I, I, I’m trying to move away from keeping lots of separate things.

So if I make a note about something, I want it to be attached to the main work because otherwise I just wind up with too much crap everywhere. And that, that really messes with my ADHD and my OCD. I want it to be nice and organized and attached so that I have one place for everything.

I even use my Scrivener, my Scrivener project to hold the video recordings of my sessions with my editor. So my Scrivener project is quite large because it’s got all these videos in there, but everything is in there. If I want to watch those videos, I’ll put it in there.

When Ms. Catherine reads my manuscript and we record her, you know, our discussion of her comments, then I’m going to, you know, put that recording into Scrivener as well. So everything is all in one place. That way, if I, if I lose the Scrivener document, which won’t happen because I’m so anal about backups, but if I were to lose the Scrivener document, I’d lose everything.

And that would be fine because then it would be out of mind and I wouldn’t have dangling bits everywhere.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
You know where you could have a master file with all notes?

[Lon Varnadore]
Oh, Jesus Christ.

[V.E. Griffith]
Oh God.

[Lon Varnadore]
Oh God.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
In OneNote.

[V.E. Griffith]
OneNote.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
That I also keep all of my master notes for.

[V.E. Griffith]
I could, but I’m not going to.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Without it, I would not have the space opera notes that I need. Minus that one page that has the scribbles of it from my, you know, attempt at math.

[V.E. Griffith]
See, but if you used Scrivener, you could have it right next to your text without having to switch back and forth between windows.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah, I can just make a little text box right next to all of the stuff I’m working on and leave myself a note. And I can draw an arrow to it and highlight it.

[V.E. Griffith]
Wow.

[Lon Varnadore]
Yeah. All right.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
So that brings us to another question.

When do you use your notes?

[Lon Varnadore]
When doing a second draft.

[V.E. Griffith]
That’s typically when I break them out. When I’m going back through and editing, I try very hard to move forward with my drafting rather than go back over and over and over again. I leave the going over again for a second pass.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
That’s interesting. I write the notes and almost never use my notes again. It is a rarity that I actually have to pull them back up to remember what I needed to remember.

And the only reason I have as many notes as I do is because when you have 47 main characters, you get a little lost occasionally.

[Lon Varnadore]
I mean, yeah, that would be a problem.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Hasn’t been too bad. I just occasionally will forget one teenager. I feel like a mom.

I’ll go through the whole list of like, all right, here’s my entire group. And I’m like, I’m forgetting someone. And then I’ll go through again and remember that one that I missed, but missed a different one.

And I feel like my mom going through the list all the time because she used to just do all of our names. And you would just wait for her to do it a few times before she landed on the correct name. That’s how I feel with my characters.

But for me, I rarely go back and look at my notes. When I go back and look at them and remember they exist, I laugh a lot at it because sometimes they’re just like really stupid. And I’m like, why were you even thinking that?

[Lon Varnadore]
Yeah, I could see that. But at the same time, I would prefer to write my notes and pull them out or essentially have them as I’m doing the second edit or doing an edit. And even if it’s like, oh, that’s a stupid idea, but it might give me a better idea for revision.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Maybe I should ask a different question to both of you because I’m wondering, what do you consider notes?

[V.E. Griffith]
For me, a note is anything that’s not text. It’s anything to myself or that I don’t intend that the reader see. So it can be a video recording like I talked about.

It can be an image that I created with AI just to depict a character and give me something to describe against. It can be a comment about how this character sucks and I need to remove him. It can be a comment about how this scene is awesome and it needs to stay because by God, I wrote it and you’re going to fucking read it.

It’s basically whatever I don’t intend for the reader to see. If it’s only for me, it’s a note that goes in Scrivener in the appropriate place.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
That’s interesting. So if I’m writing, my notes are all research notes. I’ll never go back to them.

Like if I’m writing a note about the book itself, I consider that an editing note. It’s not like notes.

[V.E. Griffith]
You’re weird.

[Lon Varnadore]
Yeah. But I mean, you have to look at, then there’s my process, which is I literally, like I’ll just start writing and if you were to look at it, it’s like they’re notes.

They aren’t like, this doesn’t tell a story. This is just a bunch of notes and ideas and like some dialogue. Yeah.

And I can take this and I can put it away for a little bit, bring it back out and, oh, okay, cool. This, this, this, this sucks. This doesn’t, blah, blah.

Just move forward from there.

[V.E. Griffith]
And I don’t necessarily go back over all of my notes. Sometimes I make notes to myself mostly for the exercise of doing it so that I will remember what I put in the note and I keep it in Scrivener so that everything is there in the off chance that I need to go back and refer. But I remember that her hair is red.

So it’s, and her picture tells me that the hair is red too. So, you know, it’s not that big a deal. But again, if it isn’t something that’s intended for the, for the reader, it’s a note and it goes in Scrivener somehow.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
All right. So here’s a fun question because it’s well known that writers are hoarders when it comes to paper. Do you keep your notes?

[V.E. Griffith]
Yeah, of course.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Where do you keep them? Like if you’re writing like handwritten notes, where do you pile them?

[Lon Varnadore]
In the den. Like there’s where the writing area is, is just crammed with just notes of all kinds of stuff and it’s spilled over. There are boxes that I still haven’t even unpacked yet that probably have notes from some story that I wrote like five, seven years ago somewhere.

[V.E. Griffith]
If I’m handwriting a note, somebody is holding a gun to my head and making me handwrite. I don’t do that.

[Lon Varnadore]
That’s because you’re no fun. I love, I love handwriting notes.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I do too. If it comes to keeping notes, if they are written in pencil and they are printed, I know I can toss them. If they are cursive and pencil, I know I should reread them over to see if they’re important.

But if they’re in pen and cursive, it’s a definite keep, like you’re not allowed to throw that out.

[V.E. Griffith]
See, I keep everything in Scrivener so that after I die and I’m a famous author and somebody is going back through my stuff, they have it all in one place and they don’t have to decipher my hand scratch.

[Lon Varnadore]
No, I’m going to make, I’m going to make my people do that. You’re going to have to decipher my handwriting and I’m going to make it be a task because mine is near indecipherable. I can barely read it.

[V.E. Griffith]
The other problem that I have with handwriting is that I type much faster than I write like most people do and I think slower than I type. So usually I can keep up with myself better if I’m typing my notes. If I’m handwriting notes, I am losing information.

I think of something, I’m continuing to write, what I just thought of goes out the window and then it’s lost.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
That’s interesting.

[V.E. Griffith]
So that’s why I type.

[Lon Varnadore]
Or you could kind of like skip, write out the new idea as you’re bracketed or something.

[V.E. Griffith]
But then I lose the old one.

[Lon Varnadore]
No, you bracket it and then you look back at what you wrote before and then you keep going.

[V.E. Griffith]
And then my hand hurts. It’s easier to type.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I worked super hard to make sure my handwriting looks good that I’d be like, no man, people are going to read my handwriting. Actually, my grandchildren probably won’t be able to read the cursive anyway. It’ll be a foreign language to them.

So when they decipher it, they’re going to be like, I read a different language. So it’ll be fun.

[Lon Varnadore]
I remember reading an article at some point, and this was like, this was eight, nine, ten years ago, that they don’t teach that anymore. They don’t. And the thing is, if you were to ask any college freshman to write the quick fox jumped over the lazy hound.

[V.E. Griffith]
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

[Lon Varnadore]
Thank you. And do it in cursive. They couldn’t do it because they have zero idea how to do it.

They’d give you a print. They’d print it out.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
My grade was the last grade to be taught at in my school in New York. And that was, they taught it in sixth grade. And that was it.

We were the last school to be taught it. On that note.

[V.E. Griffith]
Now that we’re done showing our age.

[Lon Varnadore]
Yeah, on that one.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
You know, no, I love it. I’ll still write in cursive. And I still had teachers who couldn’t read my cursive.

And I had parents who were my age that when I was working with kids, I would write in cursive and the parent would look at me and be like, I have no idea what you wrote. But the troublemaking child understood every word I wrote in cursive. Any, any troublemaking child knew how to read cursive.

They’re like, nah, man, I know how to read this. So I know what the notes say. If we are talking about editing, and this is editing for your own book at this moment, how and like, where are you taking these notes?

[Lon Varnadore]
For me, I print out the copy. I print out a copy of the story. I’ll do line item type of thing.

And also write in notes about what should go here or increase the sentence, write a different sentence, scratch out the sentence that’s there and write a different one. If it goes for too long, I will put a number by it, go to my FreeWrite, which is the little tiny device that is amazing, or my AlphaSmart and go open up a new thing, hit up number one, and just start typing and finish up the scene or whatever notes that I make for that. And then when it comes to revising, I have the little thing for my edits that I did by hand, and I will either print up or I will have the rest of that, the idea, note, whatever ready in another document, ready to be copied and pasted over to whatever, to the main document.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
What about you, VE?

[V.E. Griffith]
It’s in Scrivener.

[Lon Varnadore]
Jesus Christ.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
At least you’re consistent.

[V.E. Griffith]
Everything’s in Scrivener. I know it’s boring.

I mean, Scrivener has got a notes feature that’s over on the right side of the text block I’m looking at. So if I’m looking at a chapter, I just need to look to the right and there are the notes or I use the red, you know, the inline annotation. And that’s all I need.

You know, those work well. If I am transcribing a note from a reader, like the notes that you might give me, Miss Catherine, or like Kim Lark might give us, our friend of the show, Kim Lark, I’ll take your notes and I’ll copy them into Scrivener so that your notes are available to me and I can look at them without having to keep Word open and Google Docs open and, and, and so that I just have everything all in one place right there.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
You guys make it sound really nice and easy. My editing process. I absolutely despise editing.

Like give me a first draft any day. Give me the middle of my book any day and I will be a happy person. My editing is insane.

And I use OneNote because OneNote is the best. Thank you.

[Lon Varnadore]
Incorrect.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
And that is because usually I do seven rounds of self-editing and I keep every single round in my OneNote so I can compare them back and forth if ever I need.

[V.E. Griffith]
Scrivener does that.

[Lon Varnadore]
That sounds monotonous.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
It is. It’s a very interesting way I do it. It used to be, I would print the first draft, like once I would print it, but then now that my like computer, I can hand write right onto it.

So now I don’t need to print it as much because, you know, save some trees, but I have a highlighting code that I go through. So I don’t even need to take notes anymore. I can just highlight and I know what the color code means.

So blue is delete. If I see something in blue, I know I have to delete it. Pink is for consistency.

So those are the only times that I’ll write a note in for like, why is, why do I need this? So if I’m realized that I’ve changed a person’s name or how they look all of a sudden, I’m highlighting that in pink. Green is for something that sounds really awkward if I’m reading it and just needs to be reworded.

So if I’m reading through it and I don’t understand it, or it sounds super weird, you’re doing a rewrite on that. Orange is for, I need to weirdly enough, like check a note on something, or I need more research on this because I do like to add historical research and things like that into my books. So I’ll, I’ll mark an orange, check this for like any of that research information you need.

And then yellow is, I really liked this or I made myself laugh and I really enjoyed this part. So I like to throw occasional of those in there because I like to feel good about my writing. So that’s, that’s my first draft and then for editing, and then I will go through and I will fix some of those things.

And then each edit has its own specific reason. So one edit will strictly be full of character. You’re going in and you’re just working on your characters.

One edit is only going to be plot and subplot. One is going to be completely just passive voice. One is strictly world building.

Then one is going to be, you go through it and make sure everything looks good. Send it off to an editor, get it back from an editor. Here’s the new version that you have written.

Now send it off to a beta. Any new copies, there’s your new version. And after your proofread, here’s your final version.

And all of them sit in my OneNote.

[V.E. Griffith]
That sounds painful in OneNote.

[Lon Varnadore]
That was painful to hear. Like just, what?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
It makes sense though, to me.

[Lon Varnadore]
I mean, if it works for you, that’s fine. But I just see it as, that’s insanity. Just, oh God.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
It’s also why I learned to hate the beginning of my book because I’ve read it the most.

[Lon Varnadore]
There you go.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
But that is how I keep the notes for myself. They are all in OneNote, which is also interesting because then depending on it, also OneNote will have all of my research notes in a folder for itself. You guys know how OneNote works or no?

[V.E. Griffith]
Explain it a little bit for the listener who doesn’t know.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Okay. So OneNote is like having a five-divide notebook or a binder. And you can set up a section in that binder that has like a tab.

So you would have that little tab. And now you have all of these pages. So in that tab, I will mark it as draft one.

And then I add page for every single chapter. So 80 chapters. I’ve now had 80 pages in there of every chapter.

Then I will add the second draft as a new tab. And I will do the exact same thing again. So once I’ve edited chapter one, now it’s in the new tab and under a new page.

So that is how I keep those notes. So I can go back and forth and pull them up side by side and go, yep, this looks good. However, I do all of my editing in Word or on Google Docs, and then copy and paste it into OneNote.

[Lon Varnadore]
Yeah, I do first draft stuff in Scrivener. I edit in Microsoft Word because I can’t in Scrivener after the first draft just because.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Because it’s evil. Makes sense.

[Lon Varnadore]
It’s not evil. It’s just very complicated. And I still don’t know.

I know maybe one-tenth of how to use Scrivener. And it’s like, I’m good with what I need it for. And that’s it.

Although I will say that to get back to the editing, well, notes with editing, there’s also a slightly different process I can have, which is, I also have a Remarkable, if anyone knows what that is.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
They’re e-inks. Digital paper.

[Lon Varnadore]
Yep. And pretty decent. They work really well.

I will, unfortunately, I have to put it into a PDF, send it to the Remarkable. Then I can write out whatever I want. And if I need to write something, I actually have a keyboard for it.

So I can actually turn it. Yeah, one of the newer versions has something with a keyboard. And you can actually write on it with a keyboard.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Doesn’t that take away from the fact that it’s digital paper? Sort of.

[Lon Varnadore]
But at the same time, it’s better than, this I can keep all in one thing. I can write it in my Scrivener, put it into a PDF, put it into my Remarkable, edit. And if I need to continue, I can write down the stuff on the Remarkable as well.

And then throw everything back to Microsoft Word at that point and just go through. Plus, when I mark something on the Remarkable, it might look black. But when it’s on Microsoft, it’s actually red.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
That’s cool. My SuperNote does that too.

[V.E. Griffith]
If I’m doing something like working through a workbook from our friend, the Dialogue Doctor, Jeff Elkins, I will put that on my iPad in PDF. And I have a pen for my iPad. So I can see what I’m writing in color when I do it.

And then I can move the PDF back and put it in Scrivener. I really like doing it on my iPad. The only downside to the iPad is that it doesn’t last near as long as something like a Remarkable in terms of battery.

[Lon Varnadore]
The battery life on it is not remarkable. I can leave out for weeks, come back to it. It’s like, oh, it’s only like a few bars down.

Like with the iPad, if I leave it overnight somewhere, it’s like it’s dead the next day. And there are times when I will do editing on Microsoft on the iPad, because then I can just do the stuff in color there. But that’s a whole Microsoft Office thing, which is just weird.

And sometimes I can’t get into the other things that I wanted, because they’re under a different name or something. And it makes no sense, because it’s still my account.

[V.E. Griffith]
Well, does that about cover it?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I think so.

[Lon Varnadore]
You think so?

[V.E. Griffith]
Okay. Well, what we’ve learned today, I think, is that there’s two right ways to do it and one wrong way to do it.

Right, Lon?

[Lon Varnadore]
Yes, exactly.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
One note all the way, guys. Not Scrivener.

[Lon Varnadore]
Nope. Nope. Nope.

Sorry. Two against one here.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I don’t know. You don’t even use Scrivener for the whole thing anyway. So here we go.

One note and Word is the correct way. See? Two of us are using it.

I don’t use OneNote. All right. The Word part.

God, Lon.

[V.E. Griffith]
Okay. Well, that does it for this week. We will see everybody next time.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
All right. Stay magical. Bye, everybody.

[V.E. Griffith]
Bye.