helenwritesit My life revolves disproportionately around Post-it Notes. I use them at work and in real life. But mostly, I use them for writing.
They are there in the middle of the night, when I wake up from a vivid dream with novel potential, or when I am lying awake unable to ignore the beginning of an idea for a character or a plot.
They are the only way I can stomach a complete rewrite. Mapping out the plot of my novel scene by scene on individual Post-it Notes means I can move things around, play with the timeline and add in or take away scenes without it getting (too!) messy. You can colour code characters or themes and use the little ones to point out important moments throughout the narrative. Post-it Notes give me a sense of my novel’s overall shape, which means I can dig down into the important bits and make improvements. And I can always zoom out again and look at how the changes I want to make impact the novel as a whole.
Post-it Notes also help me keep on top of my writing. Once I’ve written out my plot, with individual moments or chapters on each Post-it Note, I put one or more of them on my laptop each evening as a reminder of what I’m aiming to achieve in terms of scenes or word count the following day.
If you haven’t introduced Post-it Notes to your writing tool kit, give them a go. I, for one, couldn’t live without them!
