How to Organise Research for a Novel Using Free Tools
A practical guide to keeping novel research tidy with free note apps, spreadsheets and a sensible folder structure you will actually maintain.
Research for a novel arrives in scraps. A photograph of a street sign, a paragraph copied from a museum leaflet, three pages of notes on how a 1930s bakery smelled, a bookmark you will never find again. Gathering it is easy. Finding it when your character walks into that bakery on page 214 is the hard part. You do not need expensive software to solve this. A free note app, a spreadsheet and a folder structure you use consistently will hold almost any novel's research.
Give the book one home
Start with a single folder named after the work in progress, not after your feelings about it. Ashfield_Novel_Research will still make sense in a downloads list two years from now; Book Stuff will not. Inside, keep a small number of subfolders:
- Setting — maps, photographs, weather records, street layouts, floor plans.
- People — real-life inspirations, occupations, speech patterns, family trees.
- Sources — articles, books, interviews, PDFs you are entitled to keep.
- Images — anything visual, including your own photographs.
- Scratch — loose notes you have not sorted yet.
Three to seven top-level folders is plenty. Resist nesting deeper than three levels, because deep folders hide material. If you cannot remember which subfolder a note belongs in, it belongs in Scratch until you can. And put the whole thing in a cloud folder that syncs, so a spilled cup of tea is an inconvenience rather than a disaster.
Choose one note app and stay with it
Free note apps are plentiful, and most of them will do the job. Obsidian, Joplin, Simplenote, Apple Notes, Google Keep and OneNote all have free versions that comfortably handle text, images and links. The common mistake is using four of them at once, then forgetting which one holds the interview with the retired lock-keeper.
Pick one for your own writing and learn five features properly: search, tags, internal links, attachments and export. Tags do the heavy lifting. A note titled "Tide tables, October" is findable; the same note tagged #setting/rivers and #timeline/act-two is findable in a way that suits how you actually think while drafting. Internal links let you connect a note about a character's childhood to the village where it happened.
Export matters more than it seems. If your notes can leave as plain text or Markdown, you can move to another app later without retyping a thing. Check this before you commit to a hundred notes, not after.
For sources specifically, a free reference manager such as Zotero will store book details, page numbers and web addresses in a form you can export as a bibliography. It is a different tool for a different job, and it is worth the afternoon it takes to learn.
Keep a facts spreadsheet, not a prose one
Note apps are good at paragraphs; spreadsheets are good at sorting and filtering facts. A spreadsheet lets you ask "which scenes depend on the tide times?" and get an answer in seconds. Set up one sheet with these columns:
- Fact — one sentence, plainly written.
- Category — setting, timeline, occupation, weather, transport.
- Source — book title and page, or web address and the date you visited.
- Confidence — certain, likely, unchecked.
- Used in — chapter or scene number.
The confidence column is the one people skip and later regret. If you have guessed that the train from Inverness to Kyle takes about three hours, write likely beside it and check before the copy-edit rather than after. Filter the sheet by "unchecked" once a month and you have a tidy to-do list.
Keep prose out of the spreadsheet. A cell holding three paragraphs of description is a cell you will never read again.
Name files as though you will be tired
A dull filename is a kindness to your future self. Put the date first in year-month-day order, then the topic, then the source: 2024-06-11_harbour-tides_admiralty-chart. Sort the folder by name and everything lines up in the order you collected it, which is often the order you will need it.
A filename is a note to a stranger, and that stranger is you in eight months.
Rename screenshots on the day you take them. IMG_4471 tells you nothing; 2024-09-03_bakery-shopfront_walk tells you the street, the date and why you stopped.
Cross-reference so notes and facts find each other
Short codes keep two systems talking. Give each note a prefix and number: SET-014 for the harbour, PER-003 for the lock-keeper, SRC-021 for the tide chart. Put the code in the note title and in the relevant spreadsheet row. Then, at the top of a scene file, list the codes the scene depends on.
It sounds fussy for a first draft, and for a first draft it can be. But codes cost seconds to add and save whole evenings later, particularly when you are revising chapter nine and cannot remember whether the ferry ran on Sundays.
Record sources properly and quote carefully
When you take something from a book, write down author, title, publisher, year and page number. When you take it from a website, note the address and the date you visited, because pages move and quietly disappear.
Quoting briefly with attribution is normal practice in nonfiction. Reproducing a substantial piece of someone else's writing usually requires permission from the rights holder, and lyrics and poetry are treated more strictly than prose. If you are unsure whether your use is acceptable, seek advice from a qualified professional rather than guessing.
The ten-minute weekly tidy
Set a repeating reminder and do four things:
- Empty the downloads and screenshots folders: rename each file, then file it or delete it.
- Add any new facts to the spreadsheet with a source and a confidence rating.
- Open the Scratch folder and either file the notes or bin them.
- Back up. Sync the research folder and copy it to an external drive once a month.
Ten minutes a week keeps the whole system honest, and honesty is what makes it usable at speed. A messy system you avoid is worse than a simple one you maintain.
The research exists to serve the writing. When you can find the smell of that bakery in under a minute, you will spend the afternoon writing instead of searching.
Photo: StockSnap / Pixabay
