susan orlean on organizing her writing

I got to meet one of my writing heroes, Susan Orlean, on Saturday at Cleveland Public Library. She did a Q&A with a group of Lit Cleveland members and other writers who had attended a morning workshop on How to Create Creative Nonfiction. One of the things she talked about was how to organize your writing: "You can be the most beautiful writer in the world, but if you can't organize well, it won't work," she said. Orlean writes ideas down on note cards and then moves them around in order to visualize how they'll be presented within the book. While writing The Library Book, which has four separate story lines, she began telling people about the book and listening to herself as she did it. "I talked about the stories out loud a lot to begin feeling out the organization," she told us. She also suggested studying other books you admire and love: "Look at other books as structural models. Learn from them."

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