Mind Mapping

Hi all! I’m bashing out posts at a pretty rapid rate at the moment, and will for a while – if only so people have something to actually read when they visit the blog. Today’s post is all about Mind Mapping.             
                MindMapping is a great brainstorming method. Done properly, it can significantly increase your creativity and cut down on planning time – it also changes the way you think.
                I tried this out once for my novel and found that the mind map just got way too convoluted to be useful. It also caused me to spend (an overly long) time planning rather than actually writing. When I got to about 70,000 words, my manuscript stalled and I decided to try mind mapping again. At that point, I didn’t have any chapters, and by mind mapping the events, I was able to work out what areas of the novel needed a bit more work, what my chapters were and I also got an idea of pacing. This helped me get back on track with my novel and I’m steaming ahead once more. 
                Mind Maps are great when done on a huge piece of butcher’s paper in colourful textas (apparently colours help us retain information better, and mind maps are better than linear lists). I quite often do mind maps on paper when I’m planning up an essay, but for my novel, I went with a great little program called FreeMind. FreeMind is one of those wonderful, open source programs created by people with programming talent and a love of sharing. This tool is a free download and is simple and easy to use – I highly recommend it.              
                While MindMapping can be used as a free flowing brainstorm tool, it can also be used for mapping information you already know. This is what I did. The central node was simply the title of my novel, and then the nodes coming off of that were labelled Main Characters, Minor Characters, Bit Players, Locations, and Chapters. Each of these nodes then branches off into as many branches as are required.          
                ‘What are nodes?’ you ask. Some fancy term for little dots connected by lines – download the software and try it out for yourself. It’s really quick to download and, I promise, you need about two minutes to get the hang of the basics. Here’s an example of what you can do using FreeMind (or good old pen and paper):

 

To keep with the current theme, my next post will cover a few different software programs geared towards writers.

The Adventure Begins!

Welcome to the beginning of my journey into the world of blogging. I’m not a blogger, by nature, but I’m writing a novel and heard that a great way to kickstart the creative juices is to keep a journal. Then I thought: why not start a blog, instead? I was a bit dubious about both journal and blog, at first, but as they say, you never know if you never go.          
                I suppose the main intention of this blog is really an experiment. If I do ever become a successful writer, I’m going to need communication skills talking to actual people and that includes communications on the web, so this could be practice. Getting ahead of myself? Maybe, maybe not.  There’s nothing wrong with being optimistic and I’m killing two birds with one stone, really – a foray into a sort of online publishing and a method of inducing creativity (hopefully!). I’m definitely keen to see if the latter is successful.
                I wouldn’t say I’m stuck with my novel, but I don’t really have a plan, either. I’m in freefall and I think at this point it’s time to gather myself and all my plotlines together and try to weave them a little more tightly. They do this fairly well, already, but the problem is that the novel is in multiple POV and I strongly focus on the main character – not unexpected. My problem is with the two minor protagonists. They’re there at the beginning and they’re there at the end – I’m all over the shop with this book – but they seem to drop off the face of the earth during the middle.  I’m slowly working them into the storyline, but sometimes I’ll sit at my computer for hours and only get a few hundred words down. I don’t have the time to be that inefficient and I’m hoping that knocking out a few hundred blog words first might loosen my tongue, so to speak.      
                When I first thought of doing this, it was going to be a recount-of-my-day sort of thing, but I eventually decided I’d be better off with a writing-themed blog where I can share the lessons I've learned and hopefully hear from people on the same journey. I know there are a lot of writing blogs out there already, but this one is for me, so there!
                More seriously though, most of the writing blogs I've read are by established writers and the content often wanders into what's going on with their latest book or where they had their last holiday - I'd like to keep this one revolving around writing techniques and novel progress.


                I hope you're keen to get involved - until next time!