This month, I’m providing a writer’s technology tip-a-day (along with other posts) to help you in your writing goals.
Today’s tip: Use mind maps to organize your work.
Wikipedia has a great definition of a mind map:
A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.
For writers, its a digital way to organize our work or writing projects. Compared to notebooks, outlines, or three ring binders, a mind map offers these advantages:
- Capture brainstorming. When we’re first starting off on a project or work, we usually brainstorm all the things that need be done on the writing project. Some of the work is pretty standard, of course, but capturing the ideas is central to having unique point of view for our work.
- Effortless organization. One of mind mappings great features is the ability to take an item drag and drop it from one category to another.
- Outlining. Mind maps are great tools to use to outline what needs to be done. Since you can create the mind map around subjects, each subject can be a chapter or scene in a book. Extensions to that subject can be what the scene or chapter is about, point by point.
- Visual To Do List. Mind maps can not only provide reference areas for your work (such as having a character from your manuscript with all the associated history of the character captured in your mind map), but also a way to visually have your next actions by category for the project. For example, you can have a “research” as well as an “interview” subject area for your writing project and capture what needs to be done in each area.
- Color your world. Mind maps can use color to differentiate different areas of the mind map. If you regularly color code your your subjects (via folders, highlighters, etc.), you can carry that over into most mind map programs.
Mind maps are great tools for writers. To see a demonstration of how mind mapping works, visit the MindManager tour site. While the demonstration is about business, change the subject matter to writing and you’ll see a completely different way to organize your work.
Scot
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Gaelen 09.04.07 at 4:54 pm
Hi Scot,
I just came across your blog about how writers can use mind maps to organize their work. This is a blog posting my colleage, Melinda, wrote on a similar subject a few months ago. I thought you might want to check it out:
http://blog.mindjet.com/2007/06/416
Gaelen
Scot Herrick 09.04.07 at 5:21 pm
Clicking on the link will take you to the MindJet blog with great excerpts for how Richard Powers helped write his National Book Award-winning novel using a mind map.
The writing, of course, is still what counts. But, the point of this blog is to show how technology can help a writer. This is a great example.
Thanks, Gaelen; I really appreciate the comment and the example of how this technology can help.