Writing a Novel Using Ulysses for Mac — Part II: Organization

Chapter Series — Index.

1. Rationale
2. Organization (this post)
3. First, let me explain my organizational needs.

I write Fiction & Non-Fiction books, and Blogs.

Within each category (Books), I have more than one book.

For each book, I need to capture research, store blurbs, queries, and other material related to publishing, hold discarded pages and chapters, and then, of course, keep the manuscript.

I like to divide my manuscripts into multiple parts — like the beginning, then intermediate parts, and then end.

And finally, each part has multiple chapters within it, with each chapter containing multiple pages.

What that means is a structure that must mimic this:

Type
   Book
     Research
     ...
     Manuscript
        Part
          Page

And repeat for each Type and Book.

Oh, and then I also want to keep and publish blog posts, like this one.

See? The nesting hierarchy is quite complicated. Imagine organizing all this in folders with word documents, or in multiple notebook/page/sections of OneNote — it gets really unwieldily and inefficient. With that said, here’s a screenshot of my Ulysses organization. I find it simple and clean. You can add parent “folders” (called groups — read more here), and then choose the icons to represent your hierarchy items.

Picture 1: The top-level hierarchy

Writing with Ulysses — Part II / Top Level Hierarchy

You can see how all my work is collapsed to a few nodes.

Picture 2: An individual book, expanded hierarchy

Writing with Ulysses — Part II / Book Hierarchy

Picture 3: Within a group, showing individual pages

The image above shows the following, left-to-right.

1. Hierarchy
2. Chapters within a Part
3. An individual page being edited, within the Part
4. A preview of the book, in PDF, generated through a quick export

By the way, Ulysses also backs up the data very frequently and you can easily see all your past versions in a neat, time capsule interface.

There are several benefits to this organization when combined with Ulysses’ other features.

1. I can search across entire groups, books, or even a group
2. I can create filters that can create a subset of my pages and keep it ready all the time (powerful)
3. I can manually move things around to reflect my hierarchy
4. The “Library” has a short-cut to some pages, handily available
5. There are other useful features like grouping, gluing/ungluing, labeling, note-taking — all that make the management of this body of work centralized and simple.

I can add specific pages to “Favorites” to make it easy to edit without having to get to that page within a nested hierarchy. This is handy when I’m editing a long chapter and want to keep coming back to it, or if I want to keep some pages ready to refer whenever I want.

I find the centralized organization a huge time saver and it significantly cuts “desk swivels” — i.e. me having to switch and move between many different programs and windows to accomplish my tasks.

I can now focus on writing instead of endless tinkering around to make my work efficient.

You can look up Ulysses features to get an idea of the rest.

In the next post, I will focus specifically on “exporting,” a critical and time-saving feature when you’re trying to publish your work in different mediums.

(by the way, I’m getting nothing from Ulysses for these posts, just in case anyone’s wondering. I like the software, and I think it’s fair to put out a good word. Having spent some time in the distant past on software development, I know how much work goes into creating a good product. And likewise, someday, I hope someone will leave good reviews to my book!)

Update July 2020: Note! Since this writing, I briefly went back to Microsoft Word, but I have since adopted a new system of writing with Visual Studio Code and then using a tool called PowerManuscript to speed up several aspects of the process.