Getting Organised: Part I | Busybird Publishing

Naming Your Files

Here’s something which shouldn’t be so hard. Yet it is.

And it makes me angry.

How do you name your files when you’re writing? Well, that should be simple. How about this?

The Title of My Blog.doc

There. That’s easy. What else would you call it?

What about when you revise it? What do you call it then? Some people will call it this …

The Title of My Blog.doc

That’s right. They’ll save right over the top of the old file. To this practice, I can say only two things …

WHAT? ARE YOU #&@!ING CRAZY!?

What happens if you mess up? What if you had a passage just right, you tweak it, mess it up, and can’t recall how you had it previously? How do you get it back? Time travel? What if you redraft numerous times, and need to go back three or four drafts to check on something – how do you manage that now? To the people who do this with their files, go sit in the corner for five minutes, then come back and resume reading. Go. Now.

Others might have a cleverer approach, something like this for their new version …

The Title of My Blog (New).doc

It’s infallible. How can you go wrong? And the next revision might be:

The Title of My Blog (Newer).doc

And the next one might be one:

The Title of My Blog (Newest).doc

We could go on forever and whilst there’s some logic in it, there’s no real order, or capacity for multiple revisions – and, hey, this is writing. You might go through nine or ten drafts. I’ve gone through thirty or so with some short stories. Can you find that many variations of ‘New’?

Others might do this:

The Title of My Blog (Revised).doc

Et al. Again, same problems. Words are powerful when used correctly, but for this sort of cataloguing they can be both limiting and confusing.

Some of you might be shaking your heads, condemning the folly of people who name their files like this. You might think yourselves logical. You might use something like this:

The Title of My Blog – 26 January 2014.doc

There you go, a date delineating the draft. When you open the folder containing your piece, you’d hope to see this:

That works, doesn’t it?

NO!

Most computers will list file names numerically. So, when you open the folder containing your files, it’ll actually look like this:

There’s the numerical sequence: 1, 2, 10, 24, 26. This will also hinder any attempt to use a numeric date, e.g. instead of 1 February 2014, using 1.02.2014. We’ll just get similar sorting. Also, you literally have to wade through every file to work out which is the most recent. Here, it’s the third file – and this is just a little list! What if we had twenty files to sort through?

Of course, we could have our computer sort our files by date, but why complicate issues? We should be making our lives as simple as possible.

How about if we put the month before the date? E.g.

The Title of My Blog – February 1, 2014.doc

How does this look when we open our folder?

The computer – as computers do – sorts the files alphabetically. At least now the numerical sorting keeps those dates (within each month) in order, although that doesn’t do us much good overall when February comes before January.

Another issue with these methods is we don’t know how many drafts there’s been. We can’t look at all the variations of ‘New’, or all the dates, and know instantaneously that we’ve written five drafts. We actually have to count them up.

What we want is a method that lets us know, at a glance, which file is the newest and how many drafts we’ve gone through.

Here’s my method, beginning with my first file:

The Title of My Blog (Draft 1.01).doc

1, meaning it’s my first draft. .01, meaning it’s the first version of that draft. Then, when I revise, it’s:

The Title of My Blog (Draft 1.02).doc

When I open my folder, my files will be presented thus:

All nice and neat.

This might seem like it’s unnecessarily complicating the issue. Why not just name them …?

Firstly, the length of file names changes when I go into double digits. E.g.

It’s just a little thing, but it annoys me. I want things neat and aligned. The way to mitigate this would be to precede all the single numerals with a zero …

Now they’re aligned.

But the problem still here is there’s no marked way of distinguishing between a redraft and a restructure or a rewrite. The differences?

redraft: going over your piece from word one and revising
restructure: chopping out whole sections, writing in whole new chapters that weren’t there before, shifting things around
rewrite: opening a NEW document, and rewriting your piece from the very first word.

When I begin a restructure of a rewrite then I bump up the first digit and reset the decimal. E.g.

The Title of My Blog (Draft 2.01)

This is the first draft of the rewrite, (and one that bears little structural similarity to its predecessor).

In a folder, I might see something like this:

This tells me immediately that there were five drafts, then I either started from scratch, or restructured the hell out of it. It might require quick mathematics to know how many drafts overall if I have something like this …

… but it’s not too hard to add .05 and .03 to get 8.

Finally, for any editors reading, when the author sends you their file, make sure you distinguish it from the file you work on. E.g.

The file marked ‘(original)’ will always stand out alone as what the author sent me.

Ultimately, you don’t have to use this system. Just make sure that you do use a system, and it’s one that’s orderly – both for your computer and yourself.

L.Z.

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