Please welcome Australian author, Elizabeth Rolls, a wonderful, prolific writer of Regency romance.

Wow! There’s a desk under this clutter! A desk! Who would have thought it? It’s a nice desk too. A plain, drop-fronted, mahogany Regency writing table and there’s book prize waiting for the reader who can tell me which of my heroes gave it to which heroine. The reason I know the desk is still here is that I tidied it up. Not on purpose mind you, but because I decided that there was an urgent need for the blue filing cards I bought several years back to assist in scene placement. Said blue cards were nowhere to be found, but I had a very clear memory of them being on this desk.

Since sporadic burrowing failed to disinterr them, I resorted to a major excavation of the piles of paper surrounding my laptop and discovered that the computer was actually sitting on a desk. I also discovered a pile of tax receipts which will make my accountant a happy woman, my youngest son’s Harry Potter tattooes, several book marks and the details for my Paypal account. And the blue cards of course.

The original idea when I bought them was to jot down the scene outlines for a book on them and then work out where the scenes were supposed to go in relation to each other. After which one would be able to write the book in double quick time. I have a very dear and respected friend who plans and writes whole books this way from scratch. The system sounded so good in her workshop a few years ago that I gave it a try only to discover that what leads one author to Nirvana is the Way of Writer’s Block and Despair for another.

I am a devotee of scribbling. It would be nice if I scribbled in the same notebook all the way through a book, but that’s a New Year’s Resolution for another decade. Anyway, I scribble. Then it doesn’t feel like work and I can do it for hours ignoring starving children (my own), mounds of laundry, and dust bunnies that make out-in-the-paddock bunnies look like they have fertility problems. But recently my scribbling came to an abrupt halt as I faced the knowledge that it was time to transfer my scribbles to the hard drive. Which is where the blue cards come in.

Currently I am plotting/writing a book in which several murders take place – be afraid, be very afraid; I was actually shocked at the relish and ease with which I could kill off characters in various brutal ways – and of course these murders have to be investigated. In the course of my scribbling I’d written several scenes which in my scribbling haste I assumed would follow on from each other. But when I sat down to type them up, it occurred to me that the order in which I had conceived and scribbled them was not necessarily the only possible order. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this – blue cards.

This is the moment of glory for those little blue cards. I am congenitally incapable of organising a book or chapter which does not yet exist, but it is perfectly possible to use the blue cards to arrange a series of scenes which are already in existence.

So I sat down with the little blue cards and jotted down the outline for each scene on its very own card and then shuffled them around until I had a logical order. I was really pleased with myself until I spotted the Fatal Flaw; they were all the same sort of scene involving the same two characters dealing with the investigation of the murders . . . a bit dull all strung together like that. But I needed those scenes, only not all at once. Whereupon I grabbed a blank blue card and jotted down an idea for a different sort of scene that could break things up and provide some action, and another which could develop the hero and heroine’s relationship and also provide a few clues, and so on. After which I shuffled the cards again and discovered that I had pretty much laid out two whole chapters with a minimum of angst, swearing and chocolate. It hadn’t felt like work either, that’s very important. The marvellous thing was that I’d been able to mess with the scene order and pacing without having to cut and paste and rewrite.

At this point my editor messed with my pacing by emailing with revisions on another book and I had to stop playing and actually work for a couple of weeks tweaking the previous book and finding out all about the seedy side of Bristol. But that’s done now and I can get back to my murders and type those chapters up.

What I’m hoping is that having done all the shuffling to get the scenes laid out logically before I type, I might have a lot less cutting and pasting and rewriting to do further down the track. Which would be nice because too much of that plays merry hell with a book’s continuity and can lead to heroes forgetting to unbutton their breeches at the right moment, heroines who remember something before they knew it in the first place, and editors asking if there was really a Blank Street in Bristol, or had I forgotten to fill it in?

Caveat: I’m not advocating this method. Far from it. In my experience one writer’s method is another writer’s madness. I know some writers who actually thrive on organisation and need their workspace (they even call it that!) to be tidy and have a vase of flowers sitting on the desk. My study has a corner where everything goes when we can’t think of somewhere official to store it, and any vase of flowers on my desk would be knocked over by the cat. Or me. Shouldn’t blame the cat for everything.

I do find it interesting though that a pile of cards that have had numerous close calls with the paper recycling box have finally come in handy. Although it’s possible that they were only on my desk still because I couldn’t find them to throw them out!