Narrative analyses, text generators, and plot visualizations could all help writers devise plots, settings, and characters. But writers still needed to flesh out these formulas with detail. How to enrich and enliven a barebones plot was also the subject of commercial writer’s aids and devices. Tips and tools for organizing details drawn from real-life that might be used to build a fictional world were also sold. Writers had long honed methods for collecting and organizing narrative material, from simple pocket journals to elaborate note-keeping mechanisms. Many database devices, such as Mark Twain’s late 19th-century self-pasting scrapbooks, were even patented and sold to aspiring writers. Twain’s scrapbooking drew on the venerable tradition of commonplacing and foreshadowed many 20th-century inventions for storing notecards and, eventually, programs for organizing digital content. Other organizational tools included: notebooks, notecards, card catalogues, filing cabinets, envelopes, binders, labels, bath tubs, and shoe boxes. Writing magazines and periodicals were crowded with advertisements claiming the writerly benefits of new organizational methods, word-processing software and hardware, and techniques for organizing one’s thoughts and words.