How To Organise Your Writing Work

If you spend time writing, or even if you are just getting started, you will need to organize your work so that individual essays, stories, articles, etc can easily be found in the future.

Unless you have a system, things can easily get out of hand with the result that you will end up with files and folders all over the place – not a good thing, especially if you have other non-written work strewn around, so it pays to always remember the acronym “KISS” which stands for “Keep It Simple Stupid”.

I would suggest creating one main folder called simply “Writing” (A tip for creating folders quickly is to open up “My Documents” and then simply to right click in the blank area and select “New/Folder” from the little menu that appears.). Once you have created the Writing folder you should double click to open it and then create some further sub-folders inside it. The sub-folders you create will depend on your writing work: For example you might have folders called “Articles”, “Fiction”, “Essays” and “Poetry”.

More folders can be created inside these perhaps breaking them down into subject areas or types, for example “Sport” or “Short Stories”. Of course you can be as organized as you think is relevant; for example in my “Articles” folder I have two folders called “Docs” and “Text”. This is because I like to work with nicely formatted headers and paragraphs in my word processor, but always save a copy of the finished work as plain text suitable for submission to Websites such as Helium.

Finally, don't forget to back up your work on a regular basis. This could be once a week or at the end of each month depending on the amount of writing you do. Having a well organized system and making regular backups will ensure that if the worst happens it will be a simple matter to restore your nicely organized work from the backup disk.