An ode to the humble index card

Organizing my notes for what would become A Bright Clean Mind at the Writers' Room of Boston in early 2017. Photo by Daniel Johnson.

Every student in my sixth-grade Language Arts class had to write a research paper on the same topic:

TERMITES.

I don’t know that any of us were thrilled about that—I certainly wasn’t!—but thirty years later I still get the warm fuzzies for Mrs. Kilcher for instilling my nerdly love of the 3x5” index card. Write one fact about termites on each card, arrange the cards into a logical sequence, and your paper has all but written itself.

As a chaotic creative type—at least that’s how I’ve felt on the inside, even back then—the simplicity of this tool and method has always made me feel serenely “on top of things,” especially when my tech has let me down. When my iBook crashed the spring of my sophomore year of college and I lost my almost-finished final paper for Traditional Irish Music [“that’s so NYU!”], I was able to reconstruct it quickly with the index cards I’d used to write it the first time. (In those pre-WiFi days we used flash drives to back up our papers. Guess I was too intent on finishing the thing in time—LOLsob.)

Chapter-by-chapter cards for Life Without Envy

Then and now, the humble index card is my first and best safeguard against overwhelm. Their sturdiness and uniformity calm me where my scrap-note grab-bag and Post-its fail (after all, they don’t stick so well after the first time). They are limitlessly rearrange-able. For the past twenty-plus years, fiction or nonfiction, I’ve used index cards to order my material in preparation for drafting: one idea or chapter subject/one card for nonfiction, one scene/one card for fiction, then arrange so that each proceeds inevitably to the next. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Uncle George talks time and again about the importance of causality—

I’ve worked with so many wildly talented young writers over the years that I feel qualified to say that there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t.

First, a willingness to revise.

Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality. Making causality doesn’t seem sexy or particularly literary. It’s a workmanlike thing, to make A cause B, the stuff of vaudeville, of Hollywood. But it’s the hardest thing to learn. It doesn’t come naturally, not to most of us. But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.

For most of us, the problem is not in making things happen (“A dog barked,” “The house exploded,” “Darren kicked the tire of his car” are all easy enough to type) but in making one thing seem to cause the next.

This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.

“The queen died, and then the king died” (E. M. Forster’s famous formulation) describes two unrelated events occurring in sequence. It doesn’t mean anything. “The queen died, and the king died of grief” puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other. The sequence, now infused with causality, means: “That king really loved his queen.”

Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.

—and in the process of rejigging my time-travel plot I used index cards to trace causality, like so:

Last week, fired up by all those juicy conversations with Heather and Zach, I finally felt like I had gathered enough jigsaw pieces to finish reconfiguring the plot. I (temporarily) turned my back on (not one but) two bloated Scrivener files as well as an (incomplete) spreadsheet, in which I’d attempted to track my thematic threads scene by scene. (Talk about a recipe for overwhelm.)

First I meditated for twenty minutes (it always helps).

Then I arranged the cards I’d written out so far, pulling out only three sheets from two binders’ worth of handwritten notes to refer to as I began filling in the gaps with new cards. 

Nice big classroom tables at my new workspace!

In the above photo the pink and blue cards represent mirrored emotional beats between my protagonist (Pat) and his sister (May) across the climactic section, but otherwise there have been too many color codes over the past several years for any pretense of consistency here. (Ideally, yes, you could use different colors to gauge your pacing and so forth.) I had to make two layouts because there are two timelines that needed to be “braided” together (my agent’s excellent suggestion), first the A-B-C-D layout and then the layout you see here, the 1-2-3-4, which I created by stapling small stacks of scene cards into sections and then alternating A and B (for parts 1 and 2) and C and D (parts 3 and 4). (Someday I will get into the nitty gritty of this process, if there is enough interest!)

It felt AMAZING to lay it all out for the first time, start to finish, after almost two years. I was riding high that night, let me tell you. NOW I HAVE A CLEAR STEP-BY-STEP PATH TO A NEW ROUGH DRAFT!

Here’s the thing though: I’m still missing a couple major details. Something awful is going to happen to May, for instance, and I’m still not sure how it’s going to come about. But the causal thread—leading us to that point and beyond it—is now solid enough that I could put an index card as a sort of “temporary brick” in place, and continue building. Given the much quicker flow of ideas in the short time since I finished this layout, I have every confidence that a humble 3x5” index card will hold the space for that murky plot point to figure itself out while I’m working on the rest of it.

Fun fact (and thanks again, Mrs. Kilcher): termites are even older than the dinosaurs!

More on index cards:

Gail Carriger, Using Index Cards to Play With Author Brain

David Gerrold/Rachel Scheller at Writer’s Digest, Create Structure in Your Fiction Using Index Cards

John August, 10 Hints for Index Cards

Susan Orlean, Another Essential Writing Tool You Should Own in Large Quantities

P.S. The International Rescue Committee is the humanitarian aid organization to which I contribute on a monthly basis. Here’s a link so you can click through and donate if you feel so inclined.