Writing Trees Resources
Keep track of the work behind your drafts.
Building something substantial takes a bit more than producing new versions. You have to make decisions, change direction, protect ideas, revisit old ones and put in hours of work that your drafts alone might never show.
Writing Trees Resources are designed to help you keep track of that development while helping you move your work forward at the same time.
A Weekly Rhythm
Reflect on the week you’ve had before you plan the one ahead.
Planning a new week can be useful. But before deciding what should happen next, it can be helpful to look at what actually happened in the week you’ve just finished.
Our free End-of-Week Reflection Tracker and Sunday Pre-Week Accountability Tracker are designed to work together.
Start by reflecting on what’s moved forward, what’s changed, what’s become clearer and what still needs attention. Then use that understanding to decide what matters in the week ahead.
You don’t have to use them on a particular day. If Sunday is when you usually reset and prepare for the week ahead, simply complete the Reflection Tracker first, then move into your Pre-Week Accountability Tracker.
Over time, the two give you more than a plan for what you hoped to do. They help you build a record of what you intended, what actually happened and how your work developed from one week to the next.
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End-of-Week Reflection Tracker
Close the week before you reset.
Progress isn’t only in the word count.
The End-of-Week Reflection Tracker gives you space to look back at what actually happened in your work before deciding what should happen next.
Use it to:
- Notice what moved forward even when progress isn’t immediately visible in a finished draft.
- Recognise what changed in your work, your thinking or the direction you were taking.
- Capture what became clearer and anything that surprised you along the way.
- Identify what still needs attention without assuming everything has to carry into the next week.
- Notice when priorities have shifted and something that seemed important a week ago no longer does.
- Decide what’s worth carrying forward before setting expectations for the week ahead.
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Sunday Pre-Week Accountability Tracker
Decide what matters before the week gets noisy.
Once you’ve reflected on the week you’ve just finished, use the Pre-Week Accountability Tracker to decide where you want your attention to go next.
It gives you a simple way to set your intentions, protect your focus and keep evidence of the work happening between your drafts.
Use it to:
- Track your effort over time without creating a separate progress log.
- Build supporting evidence alongside your drafts as your work develops.
- Record what you want to move forward including what needs your attention, what’s already working and what can wait.
- Keep a clearer record of your process when publishers, tutors, supervisors or collaborators ask how your work has developed.
- Look back at where your effort went not just at the drafts that survived into the final version.
- Capture new ideas without losing your current focus and return to them when you’re ready.
Seeds and Branches
Plant the idea. Decide what happens to it later.
New ideas don’t always arrive when you’ve got time to follow them. That doesn’t mean you need to lose them.
The second page of our Pre-Week Accountability Tracker gives you somewhere to plant those seeds as they appear. Date each page, keep it with your developing work and, over time, you can build a booklet of ideas, observations and possible directions that you might otherwise have forgotten.
Some seeds may grow into important branches. Some may need more time or attention. Some may eventually be pruned. By capturing them first, you don’t have to make that decision the moment the idea arrives.
Nurture or prune. Decide later.
Build your drafting portfolio as you go
Your drafts only tell part of the story.
A folder full of drafts can show that your work changed. It doesn’t always show what you were trying to achieve, what you were concentrating on, which ideas appeared, what you chose to leave alone or how your thinking developed between one version and the next.
Keep your completed trackers alongside your drafts and they begin to build a contemporaneous record of your effort, priorities, reflections and development without asking you to stop creating and reconstruct your process afterwards.
Over time, your Reflection Trackers, Accountability Trackers and Seeds and Branches pages can become part of a broader drafting portfolio, helping you see more clearly how your work developed.
Already using NARRify®?
If the trackers are useful, NARRify® goes further.
The trackers help you understand and record what’s happening around your drafts: your intentions, effort, priorities, reflections, ideas and development over time.
NARRify® helps you understand what’s happening within your work.
A NARRify® Diagnostic Report gives you a structured view of narrative patterns, relationships and areas that might need attention, without writing, rewriting or replacing your judgement.
Used together, your trackers, drafts and NARRify® Diagnostic Reports can give you a fuller record of your work as it develops.
If they help you, tell us.
If the trackers help you organise your thinking, keep track of your progress or move something forward, tag Writing Trees on social media and let us know how you’re using them.
Your experience helps us understand what’s useful, what’s working and what we should grow next.