Nobody is going to make fun of your stick figures.ĭecide if you want to go old-school or digital. There are no mistakes, there’s no required structure, and Get out someĬrayons, markers, colored pens or pencils, and a blank piece of paper. There’s a reason we teach children about mind maps they’re easy to create and use without inviting stress. When you’ve been slaving away at a project for months, a mind map can use clear, engaging visuals to keep you on track in a way that checking through piles of character files or searching out planning documents just won’t. It gives you the chance to represent an entire story (or chapter, or character, or even philosophical outlook) in a matter of minutes. As a single-page physical visualization, a mind map is also a super-slim organization tool. It highlights concepts that don’t fit, or that you didn’t realize you had floating around your brain space. It connects your mind and body – reinforcing memory, solidifying ideas, and helping you spot missing connections. It helps you quickly express multiple complex ideas without the distraction of syntax. Mind mapping is done in a fast, free-thinking, creative flow. The resultant map packs a lot of information into an easily understood format, taking the pressure off your memory and giving you a new tool that can act as both a reference document and a fresh way to explore ideas. Mind maps can be as complex and varied as suits your project, but the basic idea is to simply express ideas and then connect them meaningfully. For instance, if your mind map is a way to visualize your cast of characters, an unbroken line might indicate friendship, while a dotted line might indicate antagonism. This might be the case in your own mind maps you might use a similar higher=earlier timeline style, or you could break your space into zones (to indicate different locations or characters, for example.) You might also communicate information by varying how ideas connect. Of course, in a family tree, where the information appears can also be important, since a name’s placement in reference to other names fixes it in time. Each family member is a data point, and lines connect them to show how they’re related. If you’re not familiar with mind maps, it can be helpful to picture a family tree. Mind maps illustrate the connections between different pieces of information, providing a clear way to explore intersecting ideas. The intent is to create a single reference point for complex relationships perhaps not something that imparts all its information at a glance, but something that can be easily understood without reference to other sources.

What is a mind mapĪ mind map is a visual representation of ideas (which are sometimes represented by text, sometimes by images) and how they connect. It turns out that mind mapping can be an amazing asset when it comes to storytelling, so let’s take a look at how it’s done. When we got to high school, or college at the latest, our courses became too ‘serious’ for such time-consuming doodles.īut maybe instead of junking this process entirely, we should have been updating it to suit more sophisticated projects. Do you remember story-mapping in grade school? I can picture it now: my bubbly, gel-pen lettering ( man, I thought my handwriting was beautiful) inside a few dozen circles, spidered together with linking lines and connecting thoughts.

Conceptdraw mindmap to write a book