Congratulations! Welcome to the fellowship of the pen and ink! We have plenty of room at the giant table o’ authors. What’s that? You don’t think you’re worthy of that title yet? As long as you’re actively working on a story, friend, you’re an author. It’s a long, bumpy road with switchbacks, sinkholes, steep hills, sudden drop offs, and long stretches of nothing – and everyone’s path is a little bit different, but remember: anyone who’s ever set word to page has been on it, and we’re all on it together.

You have all your research. Well, probably not all because you’ll undoubtedly come across something you need to know more about or something you want to change, but let’s say you have enough of it done and feel ready to write. You dig your way out from under a pile of library books only to find that your carefully excavated facts are everywhere. They’re scrawled on sticky notes, slapped in notebooks in no particular order, sent to yourself in text messages, scattered across five different note-taking apps, and there’s always the one thing lodged in your brain you swear you’re not going to forget.

How do you work with all of these words and phrases and dates and statistics?

You’re going to have to organize them. And when I say “organize” here, it has nothing to do with whether you’re a plotter (someone who plans their story out in varying degrees of detail before they start writing) or a pantser (someone who jumps in a goes with the story flow). It has to do with finding what you need when you need it whether you’re a plotter or a pantser.

Everyone does this a little differently. I’ll be talking about what works for me, but I’ll try to throw in some stuff from writer friends as well.

I start by deciding on some umbrella topic tags such as: Venetian banking, the 4th Crusade, Madame de Pompadour, and Renaissance furniture (for example). Once you have those topics sorted, you can decide how, exactly, you want to gather your factoids together under them. I used to use notecards and a bulletin board, but that can get unwieldy and has zero portability (though you could, hypothetically, take picture of each edition and keep it on your phone). Now, I use notebooks and colored pens; the colored pens are a topic cue in case I run out of space in the notebook and have to pick up Madame de P again after moving on to Venetian banking.

BEHOLD! My Research!

Most civilized humans have moved beyond the analog and into the digital, where it’s easier to slot additions into a section later and where, provided you save regularly, you’re far more likely to retain your data. Most word processors will allow you to do a simple outline, and Google Drive and/or Dropbox are pretty safe places to save important documents; they’re also both accessible on mobile so you can add stray bits and pieces from anywhere with WiFi and use your outline from wherever you decide to write on a given day.

Scrivener is a program designed specifically for writers that has an outline function and a digital card and bulletin board function; I have Scrivener but there are so many features it takes a while to learn properly and I don’t have the patience. Those I know who have put that time in are extremely loyal the program, however, so it comes down to whether or not the learning curve is something you’re willing to deal with.

Whichever way you decide to go, make sure you keep a list of which books you’ve used so you can credit the authors in a bibliography at the end. While you don’t necessarily need citations in fiction, it’s only polite to acknowledge that, while you’ve done a buttload of work, you piggybacked on someone else’s buttload of work to make it happen.

What do you do once all of your facts are lined up in nice, neat rows? Or, you know, sloppy, weirdly shaped, multicolored blocks? You start figuring out how and where you’re going to use them. And how do you do that?

Some people just… do. That’s a skill I don’t have, and when I try to go that route, I end up hating what I write and starting over again 57 times. I can tell I’m on the right track and getting serious with a story when I pull out my guidebook.

There are a million books about writing and a million books about how to create fiction. I recommend taking some time to go to an actual bookstore where you can flip through a bunch of them to figure out which one turns on those cartoon light bulbs that shine out of your eyeballs.

My go to, after much trial and error, is Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff Vandermeer. Wonderbook is less of a “how to” guide and more of a “these are all the bits and here’s how you connect them” guide. The sections I find myself using most are:

• “The Elements,” which discusses the necessary parts of any story.
• “Beginnings and Endings,” which is pretty self-explanatory.
• “Narrative Design,” specifically the section that has you compare your character’s regular day to the normative difference that makes the story interesting.
• How to craft characters, including suggested traits to explore.
• Character webs, which are visual representations of how all the characters in the story are related to one another.
• The Hand of Possibilities, which allows you to lay various ideas out beside one another so you can pick what works best for your narrative.

Interspersed throughout are essays by authors from Nnedi Okorafor to Neil Gaiman about their own writing and the struggles that come with the craft no matter how experienced and popular you may be. There are some digital options that are a lot like Wonderbook, but I’ve found most of them are needlessly complicated and difficult to get support on, so a five-pound analog edition it is.

Wonderbook also has fantastic illustrations, some of which are practical and many of which are fun mnemonics.

Right. Your research is organized and your story has a scaffold. Where to next? Next, you get to start writing…