My Writing Whiteboard
Advice, King's Monster, Ashen Wings
I’ve mentioned my writing whiteboard a couple of times, so I thought I’d go ahead and post an image in case any of you might want to use one.
I live in a one-bedroom apartment, so I write on one side of my dining room table and eat on the other. This is the writing side. The brown box on the table contains my pens, stapler, post-it notes, etc. The steamer trunk under the board acts as a makeshift desk surface, lifts the whiteboard to eye level when I sit, and contains things I need to own but won’t access regularly, like my earthquake emergency kit.
The whiteboard was the largest I could buy at Staples, and it’s metal so I can stick magnets to it. If I owned my own house I’d cover a whole study wall in a metal sheet painted with whiteboard paint, but for now this suffices.
Most of this board is currently dedicated to my current project, King’s Monster. Each post-it represents one chapter, color-coded by character point of view, and contains the chapter number, a few words describing the main events, and a number indicating the day of the event (starting with 1). This helps me quickly locate previous scenes and keep track of passing time.
The scrawled notes describe where the last two or three chapters are going, including scene ideas I want to remember and a few questions I need to resolve. I’d like to say they’re color-coded, too, but I’m afraid their color depends only on which pen I grab first. There’s an email from a friend magneted to the board that suggests an idea I intend to work in when I redraft. The handful of notes on the bottom right side are my preliminary scrawls for a possible Clockwork Heart sequel.
The pictures have all been glued to magnets. Most of them come from Spectrum, which I periodically buy and raid for interesting images — a few come from other art collections, comic books, magazines, book covers, etc. I’ve been collaging like this all my life; fantasy collages used to cover a whole wall of my bedroom, but for now I have to keep the sprawl confined. I cut out the images I like, glue them to sheet magnet backs that I buy at the local craft store, and then put various images on the board as inspiration, based on whatever I’m writing at the time. I try to choose images that have some atmospheric or metaphoric relevance to what I’m working on, although for the most part they’re just decorative. Only the photo of Kenneth Branagh has a direct connection to King’s Monster — I imagine one of my characters looking a lot like that.
I find a whiteboard very useful when it comes to keeping track of notes and ideas, and the line of post-it notes is absolutely essential — I can’t say how many times I’ve had to refer to them to make sure I get the timeline right. I do have a large book I use as a story bible, with about four pages flagged that I need to refer to regularly (a rough map of the city, a page describing realms and titles, a page with characters’ ages, a page with characters’ hair and eye colors), but most of my referencing is done on the whiteboard.
I’ve been thinking about trying out Scrivener to help me organize my ideas, but for now I like the physical act of writing and organizing images on my whiteboard — it helps me think when I’m tired of looking at a screen, and it acts as a useful visual reminder that whatever else I’m doing in the apartment, my novel is waiting….
drupagliassotti @ July 9, 2008