Some years back I prepared a chart to keep a book-length research and writing project from overwhelming me. Each row represented one chapter the book in progress, with the working chapter title/theme on the far left. Each column represented a research or writing “step” towards completing the chapter defined by that row, and the writing steps were framed as different kinds of “chunks.” Some chunk titles represented topics, themes or arguments that I would need to write from scratch; others referred to parts of manuscripts I’d already written (as notes, parts of other draft articles, or publications); and still others referred to works by other scholars that I planned to examine as a central feature of the chapter. The cells in any one row read from left to right as a series of incremental steps for completing a chapter, so there was always one “next step” to do for that chapter until the chapter itself was done. You can see a copy of how this table looked at about the half-way point here:
Writing Themes/Chunks Matrix

Before setting up this kind of chart (as I’d typically done with previous projects), I had developed an outline for the book project—as a study of efforts by teachers to develop shared standards in a feeder school cluster–and started developing separate outlines for individual chapters. However, when trying to write from the chapter outlines, I frequently got too deep into issues tangential to that chapter but still important to the overall book. At some point, I’d step back, pull a tangential “chunk” out of the chapter I was working on and set it aside so I could push ahead with the chapter. But it was hard to keep track of the chunks I was pulling out without attaching them to another part of the outline, and they might not be developed fully enough for me to see where they could best fit. Not only that, but the research and writing for this project took place over several years. On more than one occasion, I’d start writing a section of a chapter from scratch then find a chunk I’d already written that covered the same content. A messy way to work, and very inefficient!

One way of thinking about the challenges I faced was that the various outlines, notes and chunks I was preparing did not enable me to “see” what I’d done and what needed doing. This was important for a couple of reasons: First, if I couldn’t “see” the whole project, I could get confused or bewildered about how best to move it forward. Second, without that kind of overall vision, I could get demoralized by long lists of work that remained to be done.

I remember reading once that the author John McPhee used 3×5 cards tacked or taped to the wall to organize essays and books he was working on, and I thought about giving that a try. [I just noticed that the New Yorker of Jan 7th (2013) has a new piece by McPhee about how his books and essays are organized!]. However, I’m kind of a matrix-head, so I chose instead to convert my various file folders of chapter outlines, notes, draft book outlines and work lists into a single table.

Preparing the table helped me articulate the how the concepts, organization, and tasks of writing this book might fall together. As something of a surprise, it also provided me with a nice balance of options and constraints for moving ahead. As long as I was moving from left to right in at least one of the rows, I was moving ahead with getting the book done. But if I got stuck on that particular row, or needed a break, I could also look up or down a row and find something else to work on—something that was also helping to get the book done. By turning the outlines and work plan entries for the book into research and writing chunks I could see on the grid, I could also play with the idea of moving a chunk from one chapter to another, or revising chapter titles to better reflect the chunks listed farther out along that row.

Of course, the topics, chunks and table itself were always provisional. But preparing this as a MS Word document, I could revise as I went along, coloring in cells/steps/chunks when I finished them, or highlighting a few steps from different columns and rows as my top priorities for getting the whole shebang done and out the door. By printing out and keeping copies of the table from time to time, I also documented how my thinking about the book changed as I worked on it.

These were all positive outcomes of creating the table, and I don’t remember any negatives. But I must confess that this particular project was never finished—at least not in the book form represented by the table I’ve displayed here, though that’s not the table’s fault. At a point right about where this version was current, I got caught up in a couple of other big projects and had to set this one aside. By the time those other projects were wrapped up, six or seven years had gone by. I really enjoyed the other projects and felt quite good about the work I put into them and what came out of that—but I haven’t yet abandoned the book represented by this table, which, by my reckoning is about half done. What’s interesting to me now is that almost a decade later, the table still provides a relatively precise picture of what it will take to finish off the other half, which is something I’m heading into now.

Beyond the specifics of this particular project, using some sort of table like this to organize little chunks of big projects has become an attractive routine for me in many other research and writing projects, and in designing courses I teach as well. But in the last few years I’ve also shifted somewhat from tables to databases—FileMaker Pro in particular. In the database approach, each “chunk” becomes a record that can be labeled by values from one or more fields. That opens up prospects for a lot more links between chunks than will fit well in a table. Some chunks, for example, may appear useful for more than one chapter or more than one book. “Seeing” that through a database can be useful in working across projects, and it’s also a tool for rethinking the broader significance of an individual chunk, including how that reflects back on my own intellectual growth—or lack thereof.

Reflections of this sort are interesting enough to keep me occupied from time to time, but I do also want to get a few things done, not just figure out how to do them! So at some point it’s time to stop organizing the organizing tools and do some writing. After all, what good is a matrix or database for visualizing chunks of writing if you don’t have any chunks of writing you need to visualize!