There have been some interesting discussions going on about book and manuscript organization – see here for Kelli’s and here for Anne’s, where she discusses the impact of Bruce Springsteen on her MS. So I thought I’d put in 2 cents of my own…

For me, organization isn’t a set thing – it’s organic and keeps happening. I’m always shuffling around the order of poems, especially the first ten and last ten, and adding and subtracting poems as I make up my mind about them.

With Becoming the Villainess, the decision to turn it into five sections that mirrored the anatomy of a comic book was made right around the time I sent it to Steel Toe Books, and a major rearrangement (making the narrative arc a little darker, rather than ending on a lighter note) happened around the same time. A re-titling happened at the same time as well. This was about a year after I started sending it out, and things just seemed to come together in a new way. Getting other people to read and respond to the MS was really key too – not because I neccessarily took their advice, but the advice got my brain to work in new ways, and the bouncing around of ideas was important to me.

The arrangement and organization of my two current manuscripts are both still in flux – I arrange poems chronologically, by theme, and then try a different tack. I start writing a new set of poems, and decide to include them, then lose an old poem that feels now like “filler.” I’m trying to keep the manuscripts as close to fifty pages as possible (one’s sixty, one’s fifty-three) because I don’t want readers (who may have to read 1000 manuscripts) to be overwhelmed. I do all the usual stuff – I read the TOC to see how the titles flow and if I’ve got too many of the same kind of poem next to each other, I put the pages all over the floor and furniture (difficult to manage with two curious cats, but…) to see if they want to group together, I think about theme and how I want the reader to feel starting and finishing the book. I play different music and see if that jolts things together. Also, when I re-read the MS, I often find little tweaks I want to make from poem to poem – wow, when those poems are next to each other, I want to drop this couplet, I want to eliminate the repetition of this adjective, etc, etc.

So what about you, dear blog reader? What are your magic organization tips and tricks?