My mother's recent guest-post (which I gleefully titled “A Writing Bucket Of Your Very Own”) made a strong case for keeping all the snippets of ideas, the writing games and exercises and half-finished stories. And not only keeping them, but keeping them in a place where you can easily get to them and reread them. They need to be things that can be found.

If you're a pen-and-paper type person, then what you really need is a physical bucket (or ten) and a fast-and-loose categorising system. One that puts things into general piles so you know where to start looking for something, but doesn't crimp the edges of your creativity. Filing by genre, general theme, mood, common 'things' or even length or snippet 'type' (writing game, idea, half-baked story) could all work (though not all at once).

If your writing have moved into the digital realm*, then there are literally thousands of software packages that can help you. Finding one that works the way you want to work is the trick. I'm going to break them down into broad categories with some examples of each.

*If you're half-and-half, then make a decision already. Storing things arbitrarily in two places is just a way of creatively losing your work. Either transcribe it all to computer, or print it all out and get a bigger bucket. 

First off, this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an exhaustive list. This isn't even an exhaustive list of the categories. If I did that, we'd be here for weeks. This is just what comes foremost to my mind as most useful, like listing "spine, skull, those-little-bones-of-the-ears" from the human skeleton. It doesn't mean the rest of the human is a land-based octopus. There are plenty of other things out there, so if none of these tickle your organisational pickle, Google is your friend.

The "Writing" Software

Software developers just love writing software for writers. As poor as we (typically) are, it seems they think we're a veritable cash cow for software. And, in a way, we are. Writers are so insecure that we'll buy programs to help us write, just like we have bookshelves of "how to write" books, and go to "how to write" workshops. Anything that promises to make writing easier is an easy sell. Of course, it doesn't make the actual sitting-down-and-producing-something any less difficult, but we only find that out when we're done kidding ourselves.

But - writing software can be good for something, and one of those somethings is: Organising your ideas. Most writing programs let you create 'dossiers' and notes of various kinds, and group them together in projects. This approach works best if you're a everything-in-its-place kind of organiser, where each item will have one category, and maybe a subcategory, but that's it. You're a straightforward organiser, and don't have much need for keywords or tags or secondary categories.

• yWriter (Free, most platforms) - my first recommendation. Make broad categories as 'Chapters', and list each snippet as a 'scene' within that chapter. You can even move scenes up and down within the chapter to group relevant ones together. Very basic, graphics-wise, but free and gets the job done. Highly recommended as actual writing software (It's what I used before Scrivner arrived on windows) and works very well as a Writing bucket. Bonus: everything is stored as a text file if you want to get to it another way.
• Scrivner ($40ish, Mac and Win-beta) - my second recommendation, only because it's not free. Has a 'corkboard' so you can organise things visually if you like, and a bunch of features. Also provides keywords and metadata and tags. Highly recommended as actual writing software (it's what I use) but also works as a Writing Bucket. Also pretty, and stores things as RTF (but editing them outside of Scrivner can have bad side effects if you had notes or comments in them.
• Liquid Story Binder ($50, windows, dmeo available.) - crazily in-depth and complex story documenting software, lets you create dossiers for characters, locations, items and your pet monkey. Has a lot of 'stuff' in it, and frankly had so many features when I opened it up I felt I would spend more time learning what it could do than actually writing with it. But it's very pretty, and this style of thing might appeal. Stores information in a proprietary format (I think)

The "Note-collecting" software

I don't have anything smarmy to say about these guys. They've been around for ever (some of them), for various reasons, but mostly because people generally like to organise things. Or like to think they will. Anyway. These kinds of things generally provide more organisational power than writing software, but they're still for the straight-forward organiser, probably for people who like to have a lot of small categories, or lots of sub, sub-sub and sub-sub-sub-sub categories, and the ability to search.

• Evernote (Free, Mac, windows and most smartphones) This is a powerful little program. You can store notes (which can include images, or pretty much anything) in categories and search for them. The biggest selling point is the online-sync. Your evernote account is accessible from anywhere via the net. That can have some security concerns (unlikely), but it's also a very easy piece of software to use. No idea how it stores things, to be honest.
• Keynote (Free, windows) The motherload of organisers. You can create tabs of pages up the top. Each of those pages can have a tree of notes down the side. It creates a kind of three-dimensional tree, with the tabs being the top-most level, dimension or branch, and the tree forming the second two. Formidable organisational abilities. However, everything's stored in the one keynote file, which no other program knows how to read. 

The "not-at-all-organised" approach

• Google docs
• Individual documents in folders

Neither of these ideas are what I'd recommend - for one thing, it's just too hard to see what's inside something without opening it (which takes time and effort), which discourages you from doing so, and it's too easy to misplace something. But if you really don't want to use software, you can make your own bucket this way.

The desktop wikis

 Here's the somewhat-more-computer-savvy list - though don't let that spook you if you're less than confident with the beasts. A wiki is not a complicated idea. Think of a website - a page of stuff with hyperlinks that lead to other pages of stuff. A desktop wiki lets you link notes together like a website does, so you can be reading a note on Vegetables, find a link to your note on Carrots, click it, and bring up the Carrot note. Most desktop wikis do this by either making you highlight something and select what note it goes to, or using special wiki syntax, which is usually putting hyperlinks in square brackets, like this: [[Imaginary Hyperlink Right Here]]. It sounds complex, but I promise they're not hard to use.

The great thing about them is they're perfect for people who don't like hard and fast categories, or who prefer relationships between things to categories. You can link things that relate without having to bother about categories at all, if you like, or create great long lists of "things that fit in this category" and enter each note or snippit into as many lists as you like. 

• wikidPad (Free, multiplatform) - my personal Writing Bucket. Probably has the steepest learning curve of all the wikis, but very powerful. It lists all your notes down in a tree, but a note can exist under more than one 'tree'. Creates notes on the fly if you [[Put phrases in square brackets]] or WriteSomethingInCamelCase (note the capital letters). You can colour-code, add icons and do all kinds of crazy things. It can store everything in a text file (the same name as the note title, so they're easy to find).
• MyInfo ($50, windows) - styles itself as a 'personal information manager'. It's like a scaled-down version of keynote (no tabs, just the tree) with hyperlinks between notes. Stores things in a proprietary format.
• ZuluPad (Free, paid version available, Mac and windows) - is more beginner-friendly than wikidPad (though I personally find it less intuitive). As you type, it will automatically create a hyperlink for any word you use that is the name of another page. For example, say you have a page called 'dinosaurs'. Every time you type dinosaurs in any other page, it will automatically become a hyperlink to the dinosaurs page. Useful if you have a large mostly-forgotten batch of ideas, and a very clear and intuitive naming scheme. Serious drawback (for me) is the lack of any kind of navigation tree. All pages are listed in a drop-down at the top, which (to my mind) would get very unwieldy after thirty or more snippets - you'd need to create index pages for yourself that were specially named to appear at the top of the list. Stores in a proprietary format, but has an online sync if you register for it.

As I said before - this barely scratches the surface of what's out there, and how you can store things, but it's a start if you need to go looking.