For the last few years, I have struggled to keep track of my writing progress. My system of organizing everything was incoherent and inconsistent. I had documents scattered throughout different folders.

There were a great many writing journals with bookmarked pages. I will not even speak about the nonsensical way I recorded my writing ideas in the little Notes App on my phone. Before that, I only kept track of my writing inside my head.

This year, I decided to get even more serious about keeping track of my writing. More so than I’ve ever done in the past. Why did I do that? Because there’s a lot of benefits to creating a system for organising all your writing projects and progress and making sense of the book, poems, or serial chapters you’re writing.

In this post, I’ll be sharing some of my favourite ways to record all your story ideas, worlds, characters, and chapters in your book. If you’re a novice like me and want to get serious about your writing, stay here and read below!

Keeping track of your novel in a writer’s notebook or journal.

A journal is the simplest and easiest method of organising your writing. All you need is a notebook and a pen. Sometimes, you need a little bit more in terms of stationery, depending on how creative you want to be in your writer’s notebook. Start with a contents page and plan out all the things you want to jot down and have on record.

Create sections in your journal for characters, plot and scene ideas, worldbuilding ideas (for fantasy and sci-fi), any research you need to do, and name ideas you might have for characters, objects, or places in your story. Alternatively, you can write it all down in no specific order – without a contents page – and bookmark pages related to each other if you are using a writing journal for more than one work of fiction.

A writer’s notebook is a great way to keep track of your writing because it has blank pages that you can use for pre-writing, planning, and brainstorming. I like to think of it as the first draft of a story idea. You jot it down roughly on paper, and then you fine-tune the premise and characters in another system such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Another way to use your writer’s notebook is to collect inspiration from other sources to help you generate original ideas for your own novel. For example, dialogue quotes, summaries of scenes, and character descriptions from your favourite books, films, and tv series.

Collecting inspiration is about compiling all the things you enjoyed in other fiction so that you can create something entirely new from your own imagination. Such as using a fight scene from your favourite action film to inspire a fight scene in your writing when you struggle to picture the scene or don’t have the right vocabulary or tone in your writing yet.

Keeping track of your writing using a website or an app.

Once you have all your ideas written down on paper, the next step is to transfer them into something digital. A website or app that is easily usable and accessible on many devices so you can view it wherever you are if you don’t have your notebook with you. There are a lot of websites and apps that you can use, such as Trello, Notion, Google Keep Notes, and Google Docs, all of which are free to use online.

A digital app for keeping track of your novel has the same principles as a writer’s notebook. You can use the different features of the online tool to organize and structure parts of the story. In Trello, you can use the click-and-drop columns to create a storyboard and move scenes/chapters around until you’re satisfied with the story's flow. You can also use Trello to track the completion of chapter writing, pre-writing activities, and other activities.

When using Trello, you might feel limited by the sole layout. That’s why Notion is my next favourite tool for organising novels. This app is free up to an extent and gives you limitless pages with many different features and layouts. You can create a gallery of notes and map out a novel on a storyboard. You can use the list page to organize your ideas about different characters. You can jot down anything you want on a blank page. You can use timelines and tables to keep track of your book’s word count and your personal writing goals.

If you don’t like Trello or Notion, you might opt for something easier to track your writing. Such as Google Drive – Docs, Keep Notes, Sheets, and even Slides. One thing I like about Google Docs is the feature where you can create a contents tab for a document spanning multiple pages. It makes the document easy to navigate if you're tracking many things, for example, the characters, the plot, the worldbuilding, and more all in one place.

Having a digital tool, app, or website on-hand for your novel writing is so important. As I mentioned before, you want an online tool that is easily accessible and editable. Your digital writing folder should become a guideline or map for you to help you stay on track and keep consistent in your writing progress.

Keeping track of your novel’s word count using spreadsheets.

Before I used spreadsheets, I wrote down the wordcounts on a small piece of paper in my writing journal. It was an effective method but tedious and annoying when I had to calculate the large numbers myself. Recently, I started to use MS Excel and Google Sheets in my everyday life (personal and professional).

With a table, you can record chapter lengths and review your writing goals for your novel. You can do this by keeping track of your writing every day, week, or month. Setting a standard like this will help you understand your writing patterns and habits about any goals you set for yourself.

For example, if you have a goal of writing 500-1000 words per day, you can monitor your daily word count to see if you're succeeding in that goal or underperforming. Then you can think about the time of day you write and find the exact moments when you feel more prepared and inspired to sit down at your computer and create a better routine.

A spreadsheet with multiple sheets can act very similarly to an online tool or a writer’s notebook. The different sheets are like pages. You can keep track of your novel’s progress by month. You can also create tables for character ideas, worldbuilding ideas, and plot ideas.

Here are 3 different ways of keeping track of your writing progress. In this post, I’ve highlighted writer’s notebooks, online websites and apps, and spreadsheets, all of which are great and essential to having a great organisation system for your fiction writing projects. Remember, whatever system you use for your writing, keep it as simple as possible so you don’t become overwhelmed. Delete or archive old files and pages that aren’t relevant to the novel anymore. Label files and notebooks clearly, and make sure they’re easily accessible and editable for your convenience. Most of all, remember to celebrate your fiction writing progress, no matter how small.

Happy writing!