The Process Part 2: Organizing the letters

When I started transcribing the letters that Dad had sent me, I saved them as separate Microsoft Word files. After a few months I had quite a large number of letters transcribed, and I started putting them into separate folders—a folder for each year.

I also experimented with putting them into a single Word file for each year, as a first attempt at organization. This didn’t go well; primarily because I'd only transcribed a small portion of the letters, and going back and inserting new letters into the documents proved tedious.

Separate to the letters project, I had bought the text editor Scrivener. Scrivener is an interesting application, very different to Word. One of the things I like about it is that you can split the parts of your project into sections within your master document. These sections sort of look like individual documents, and they can then be re-ordered by clicking and dragging them, which makes reorganizing long documents much easier. 

One day it occurred to me that Scrivener would be a great way to save the letters, as it’s almost like a database. I created sub-folders for the years, then copied and pasted the individuals letters into separate sections within the years. I had to manually place them into month/day order as Scrivener does not sort these sub documents, but that wasn't too time consuming.

The Scrivener document. 

Scrivener is not a database, so it doesn’t do some things a database might do, but it did all the things that I needed; it’s search function made it very easy to find letters in the document when I was later trying to find duplicated letters, or find events that were mentioned in multiple letters.

Note that I numbered each letter, and recorded the number with the date of the letter.

Once I’d assembled all of the letters into a Scrivener document, I had 1,200,000 words and over 1,500 individual letters. This document I’m saving as a record for the family, but I didn’t really think it would be of much interest to a wider audience.

I then made a copy of the master Scrivener document, and started the process of editing it down to it’s final length.

NEXT: Editing the book.

Amazon: Letters From New Zealand: Farming, Fishing and Golf