Could a Spreadsheet—Yes, a Spreadsheet—Improve Your Writing?

"Organizing your highlights and continuously referring back to them can be a powerful way to develop your voice."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

---

When you’re reading, what do you do when you come across a line of juicy prose that makes your heart burst? I’ll bet you highlight it. But what do you do with all those highlights you’ve squirreled away? By this point, you may find yourself wading waist-deep in a neon-hued pool of sentences, Post-it shreds floating by, without a systematic way to refer back to them. 

This article will help you organize those loose quotes once and for all and turn them into a never-ending goldmine of inspiration. Revising your work will also become easier because you will have created a useful tool for improving your craft. 

So the next time a literary magazine rejects your submission and you decide to rewrite it for the nth time, the process will feel more streamlined and hopefully less agonizing. 

Why is it important to organize your highlights?

There is always a reason why we feel moved to stop reading and uncap those highlighters. When you’re reading as a writer, oftentimes it has to do with admiration. There is a part of you that thinks, Damn! I wish I had written that. Keep tuning into that sentiment. The more you notice the kind of writing that attracts you, the more attuned you become to your own aesthetics. 

Outside of writing, the practice of organizing your highlights and continuously referring back to them can be a powerful way to develop your voice. Logging a new entry forces you to examine why it resonated. In doing so, you internalize its mechanics and style so that they may influence your own writing. 

As your repository grows, having a well-indexed system is key. It keeps things manageable, preventing you from slipping back into the overwhelm that got you here in the first place. Whatever system you adopt, it’s worthwhile thinking through how to represent the fact that prose is worth highlighting for multiple reasons. Indexing allows you to quickly reference entries based on the categories that matter most to you. 

So, how should I organize my highlights?

As a former corporate analyst, the hill I’m willing to die on is that spreadsheets are the ultimate tool for organizing information. It’s not sexy, but there’s nothing more ironclad than a trusty ol’ spreadsheet to capture the magic behind beautiful writing. 

Since I’m no gatekeeper, here’s the actual spreadsheet I use that you can duplicate and immediately start working with. It contains a few rows of sample entries so you get a sense of how I use it.

If you’re a Notion user, duplicate the sheet into your own workspace by clicking the Duplicate button in the top right corner. You could also build something similar in Google Sheets, Excel, or whatever your favorite spreadsheet software is (because you 100% have a favorite spreadsheet software). If you’re not already using it, I recommend Notion since you can easily apply multiple tags in a given column without writing any custom code. 

Jamie’s spreadsheet

How to use the spreadsheet

To turn this humble spreadsheet into a valuable resource, yes, it will take routine maintenance on your part. Consider it an exercise that keeps you in tip-top writerly shape.

As you add in your own highlights, let the columns guide you. Each entry is categorized via two sets of tags that you can later filter by. That way, you can quickly pull up all quotes related to a specific craft element, literary device, or author whenever you need extra polish during revisions or if you ever find yourself wondering, What was that great Maya Angelou line again??  

Now open up the sheet, and let’s review, column by column.

Date added

I like to track when I add a quote because it serves as a marker in time. As the repository grows, it’s interesting to look back at older entries and notice how my tastes have evolved.

Craft element

Since I’m a fiction writer, I tend to group prose into these four elements: Interiority, Dialogue, Exposition, and Characterization. If you write in a different genre like poetry or creative nonfiction, your set of tags will likely be different.

Often, the prose I want to save can represent different elements at once. So I like to err on the side of over-tagging so I can pull up all related entries when I want to refer back to them. 

Why I ❤️ it

This is a dropdown of six options (Humor, Simile, Metaphor, Imagery, Word choice, and Verb choice) that generally represent why an entry is worth documenting. Like the previous column, there’s fuzzy overlap between the labels by design; they’re not meant to be mutually exclusive. This allows for more inclusive tagging and reflects the fact that I often like prose for multiple reasons. 

Quote

Input your highlighted text here. Sometimes I bold the exact phrase I love to quickly draw my eye to it, especially if it’s a longer entry. If I don’t bold anything, that usually means I love the entire passage. 

Commentary

This is where I jot down a note that doesn’t fit in any other column. I might use this field to paste in the literary magazine link or make a quick note. You can also think of this as the space where you might document any margin scrawls or annotations from an e-reader. 

Title & Author

These columns are self-explanatory. If you read widely for a given author, it may be interesting to compare what you save from one book to another. 

How I use my spreadsheet

These days, after I finish a book I’ll set aside twenty minutes to be my own data entry intern and log my favorite highlights. By now, this has become almost reflexive. 

More often than not, I read on a Kindle. So while I sacrifice that oh-so-exquisite tactile feel of a physical book, what I gain in digital features makes it worthwhile for me. The process of documenting prose I love is much less manual than it would be otherwise. 

Here’s a hack. If you also read on Kindle, you can access all of your highlights by visiting read.amazon.com/notebook. From there, it’s a matter of rapid-fire copying and pasting while switching browser tabs to your spreadsheet and back.  

One way I use the spreadsheet is as part of a meditative exercise in my creative practice. Before I begin writing, I like to review my collection of quotes to remind myself of what I love to read and why I love it. This ritual acts as a psychological cue, nudging me into a more inspired state of mind. 

This repository is also especially useful during the revision stages of a project, which is where the bulk of the work is. Let’s say a passage of dialogue reads flat. In my spreadsheet, I would filter the Element column for all entries tagged Dialogue and take inspiration from what I’ve collected so far. The more dialogue-related entries there are, the more ideas I have and the less I agonize over the editing process. To filter, right-click on a column header and click Filter (you’ll need to have duplicated the sheet first).

This is where labeling entries with multiple tags comes in handy because often elegant prose works double duty, packing great meaning into the fewest words. For example, a line of dialogue may contain an evocative metaphor while also revealing something about a character’s interiority. 

Make it your own

Now that you have your own copy of this spreadsheet and have a sense of how to use it, feel free to make it your own. Customizability, that is the beauty of the spreadsheet. It is now yours to add, take away, or modify as you see fit. For example, if you’re a poet, you might add tags to the Why I ❤️ it column like Meter or Consonance. For prose writers, you could include additional Craft Elements tags like Pacing or POV.

If you end up putting your own creative spin on it and customizing it in a new way, please reach out to me! I would love to see how fellow writers are adapting this idea to their needs.

---