What Do I Do With All That Stuff?!

By Cynthia Levinson
  

Credit: Sam Bond

Notes on journal articles. Underlining in books. Audio recordings of interviews. Video recordings of locations. Scans of archived materials. Microfilmed newspapers. Lists of contacts. Photographs of photographs. Ephemera. I’ve collected all of this and more while researching and writing my five published and three forthcoming nonfiction books, two dozen articles, and another two dozen blog posts for kids. How do I make sense of it all? Organize it? Retrieve what I need when I need it? Find that one elusive footnote source?!


Happily, as evidenced by some of the best nonfiction writers, there are many ways to manage your research, including

• Old-fashioned index cards (Lawrence Wright)
• Carboard boxes of file folders stuffed with jottings on yellow-lined paper (Stephen Harrigan)
• Wide-ruled spiral notebooks (Beth Anderson)
• Three-ring binders with articles, photographs, and timelines (Donna Janell Bowman)
• A combo of email folders, paper folders, and a source doc (Suzanne Slade)
• TextGrabber app (Kathryn Hulick Gargolinski)
• Microsoft Word docs (Larry Dane Brimner)
• Scrivener (LOTs of writers!)

Compiling and Organizing My Research

For me, everything starts with—and goes into—Evernote. This computer-based program allows me to compile and organize all kinds of material (well, except for actual things)—text, video, and audio files. I also like that Evernote clips the content on webpages, which I can then annotate. In addition, it digitizes all text, whether it’s a typed document, handwritten notes, a PDF, email messages, a photograph, a website or a scanned image, so that I can easily search for a word or phrase in any of them.  

Each item of my research (or sometimes a group of items, like scans of pages from the same book) becomes a Note. Notes that are about the same topic go into a Notebook. Notebooks that are all about the same project are compiled into a Stack.  

Let me give you some examples. Here’s a snippet of my list of Notebooks and Stacks:

The Notebooks inside the BEN SHAHN Stack line up like this:
 

Notes in a Notebook can be listed in alphabetical order according to the title I give it or by date, size, source or location. Although I organize mine alphabetically, the date feature is helpful when citing a website in the Source Notes or Bibliography because you’ll want to include the date you consulted the web in case the page has been removed or changed.
 

Put all together, my monitor looks like this:
 

Actually, this is on my second monitor. I display research there and place what I’m writing on the computer’s screen. 

As you can see from the upper-right corner, I can also share my Notes with an illustrator or editor. To help with searching and cross-referencing information, I can add Tags to Notes as well. Evernote becomes my book bible and is available both on my computer and, via the web, on other devices. So, it’s easy to insert material into the right Notebook wherever I’m doing research, even if I’m only carrying a cell phone.

Source Notes

To keep track of my sources, I follow the Belt-and-Suspenders Rule or maybe Tammany Hall’s Vote-Early/Vote-Often Rule. Book titles, page numbers, web addresses, dates of interviews, etc. are stored not only in Evernote but also in my Timelines (see below) and, for quotations, in the endnotes of my manuscripts—even for picture books, which, when published do not generally include endnotes. In fact, I use both endnotes and footnotes in my manuscripts. The former hold citations for quotations. The latter hold information for the editor or illustrator.  

Nevertheless, I’ve managed to lose and have had to burrow for one source for every book!

Timelines

Timelines, which journalists call tick-tocks, are the sine qua non for nonfiction research and writing. You must make at least one for every project: that’s a command! These are not the timelines you’ll include in your back matter; those will be pared to the most essential information for readers. These timelines hold the details of your explorations in chronological order. The task of filling them in and the questions you’ll need to ask to do so can help you uncover new information and reveal relationships. (That’s how I realized, for example, that Dr. King wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail during the Children’s March. It was an aha moment.) 

To accomplish this, a straightforward list of dates and events is often not sufficient. Depending on the scope and theme of the project, I make a chart with different headings. 

For instance, the timeline about Ben Shahn, which shows how his artwork reflected contemporary political events, juxtaposes key moments in his life with a larger context of the times.

Timeline from Ben Shahn: The People’s Painter

	Snapshots of Ben Shahn’s Life	The Bigger Picture
1898	Ben Shahn was born to Hessel and Gittel Shahn in Kovno, Lithuania.	Lithuania was part of The Pale of Settlement, the area within the Russian Empire where Jews were allowed to live.
1902	Hessel was exiled to Siberia.	Czar Nicholas II ordered pogroms—attacks—against Jews in The Pale of Settlement.
1906	Ben and his family immigrated to New York.	Nearly a million immigrants entered the United States at Ellis Island that year.

For a book that has nine main characters on two continents (appropriately, given that there were so many of them to juggle, it was a book about circus!), my timeline included columns not only for dates and events but also for the people involved in each event, the country where they took place, and even their skill—trampoline, wire-walking, etc. 

Above all, it’s critical that at least one of your timelines (have I mentioned that I often make more than one for each book?) shows how events, activities, and people relate and respond to each other, how they interact, rebel, and help one another—and, finally, the outcomes. This is where the heart of your book resides. It really is the tick and the tock. Take a look at part of a timeline for a book I wrote about civil rights.

Timeline for the Children’s March, Day-By-Day

Date	Kids’ Actions	Leaders’ Actions	City & State Reactions	Federal Action	Results
Thurs, May 2 (D Day)	·   Came from as far as Fairfield. 20 climbed in car; 800 walked (CM video) ·   Leave churches in groups of 50. 10 groups get to City Hall where they kneel & pray. (Walk, p, 58)	·   DJ: “There will be a party in the park…Bring your toothbrushes.” ·   Sign: “It’s time.” ·   Bevel called a lunch break, then started up again	·   700 arrested, bond @ $500 (Walk, p, 58). Almost 1000 arrested (CM video). 959 arrested (Kasher).
May 3 (Double-D Day)	·   Up to 2000 march toward Park & City Hall at noon.	·   MLK & S’worth hold news conference: demos will continue ·   3000 spectators	·   Connor bellowed, “Let ‘em have it!” Fire hoses. ·   20 minutes later—dogs (Walk, p. 59) ·   Several hundred arrested (Walk). 1922 arrested (CM video)	·   JFK says photos make him sick	· Kids, firemen, and journalists hospitalized

Displayed here, succinctly but powerfully, are the actions and reactions that propelled the civil rights movement. Note that I color-coded them to indicate which material would go into the book. And, as I mentioned, I included sources for the information.

Contacts

This might seem obvious but color-coded charts are also useful for keeping track of the people you interview or reach out to. My column headers are generally as follows; note that I’ve learned to include birth dates!

 

LAST NAME	FIRST NAME	AFFILIATION	TITLE	BACKGROUND INFO	REFERRED BY	CONTACT INFO	CONTACT DATES	NOTES
ASADI	Ahmed	Circus Galilee	Performer--globe	Muslim Bday: June 2014 Bro of Hla	Marc	Tel: __ Address: __ Deir al Asad	in person: July 2012	Chatty!

This is a rather idiosyncratic overview of what I do with all my stuff. I’m sure you’ll find the ways that work for you!


ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Cynthia Levinson’s books include We’ve Got a Job, The Youngest Marcher, Watch Out for Flying Kids, and, with her husband, Fault Lines in the Constitution, available in text and, soon, as a graphic novel. Two picture books are forthcoming. Her books have won, among other honors, the Julia Ward Howe, Crystal Kite, Orbis Pictus, ILA Social Justice, and Parents Choice Gold Awards. Her research and writing have given her the opportunity to walk with foot soldiers of the civil rights movement, fall off a tight-wire, and read letters housed in a condemned building.

ABOUT THE PRIZE 

Cynthia will be happy to send an autographed copy of Fault Lines in the Constitution to a lucky winner.

Leave one comment below about what struck you in the post.
You’re eligible to win if you’re a registered NF Fest participant and you have contributed one comment below.