Susan Keene Author

How is your memory?

How is your memory? How is your memory?

I write most things down. Meetings, appointments, special days and especially lists. If I deem it important it goes into my planner. When I worked for Sears, we used the Franklin method. They were so dead set on the idea Franklin worked better than any other, they sent someone from the company to teach us how to use it, and bought us the new pages for the coming year.

The premise is: everything you need to know happens in a span of three months. The month before, the month you are in and the month after.

In other words, old information about a client doesn’t really help you much. They were right about one thing, I rarely had to go back further than the month before the one I was in to look at a note. If I did need something I archived it was easy to find in the nice file box we received each year.

Now I pick up a planner for the entire year and use it. I back up with an alarm on my phone the day before or a couple hours before, depending on how much preparation it requires.

Writing books is an entirely different ballgame.  For every author there is a new way to keep track of your story. I have a notebook for each novel I write. I finish a chapter, stop, write down the important happenings, the people who were in it and any major point and most likely the number of words. Keeping the numbers per chapter is for myself. A goal orientated habit. Did I write enough today? Also, by the time I’m done with the book, I have a map of the entire story.

I can look up when I introduced a new character or offed one.

If any one of you read my offerings, it is obvious I prefer short paragraphs and short chapters. It’s an old holdover from my school days. I don’t care if it was something I needed for a book report or required reading from my dad.

First thing I did was to pick it up and see how big it was. I flipped through the first few pages to see how long the chapters were and the sentences.

Thank goodness he wasn’t a James A. Michener fan. If you aren’t familiar, take a look at a copy of Hawaii. The book begins with the formation of the islands and goes from there. Michener did write a book about the South Pacific. It ended up as the movie South Pacific. It’s most likely much too old for many of you to remember. In my mind I figured they had to cut as least 600 pages.

In case you picked up on it, our dad had required reading and a few obscure questions you couldn’t answer unless you read the book.

The entire family are avid readers so I guess it was a good idea.