5 Reasons a Writer Should Use Mind Maps

Mind mapping software allows a writer to construct information around a central topic and then add sub-topics with details or other sub-topics. It is a structured way to document unstructured thinking.

Mind maps are used all of the time in business, but what about for writers?

Over at Grow Your Writing Business, Yvonne did a review of a mind mapping program. It was a standard review of a software program and her mind map example has a great illustration of a mind map in action, using the mind map to help decide if she should change the topic of her blog.

In the comments, I offered five ways mind mapping software could be used by a writer. After looking at the comment, I decided it should really be an article here on Ten Keyboards because that’s what I do here: write about how technology can help writers.

Here are five uses of mind mapping software for writers:

1. Build out the characteristics of your characters in your book. You can have a branch for “John” and sub branches for work, family, history or whatever you want to build out about a character. Add to it as you learn things and refer to it when writing the book. Same thing with places as settings in your book.

2. In a non-fiction book, build your topics. At some point, you can put them all into a table of contents, but at least all the information on the topic is in one place.

3. Take notes at a writer’s conference (or any meeting). I did this for each of my sessions in the last writer’s conference I went to and then took the last five minutes of the session to highlight those things that I wanted to do myself based upon the session. It was very easy for me to refer back to the notes and, based upon the amount of highlighted topics I identified, which sessions were most useful to me.

4. Project plans. Usually, projects have some general areas that need to be done and then specific steps that need to happen. Each of the branches on a mind map can be used for a particular subject area of a project (think of all the things to build a writer’s conference session, for example — subject areas, resources, leave-behind materials, etc. — all can be a branch off of a central project of “Technology for Writers“ session)

5. Brainstorming on any particular subject of writing. Capturing these ideas and then subsequently organizing them into coherent possible actions is perfect for mind mapping.

The cool thing about mind maps is that they allow you to “just get it down” and then easily move what you have written around into something that makes sense for you. It’s not the fact that things go into a particular bucket that has mind map appeal; it’s the fact that you can get whatever out of your head and then effortlessly arrange what was in your head into a way that you can organize it and understand it.

Consequently, people with very different ways of organizing things can be very successful with a mind map because the software flexibly organizes information the way you want to see it.

Hat tip to Yvonne for writing the article that inspired this: Choosing Another Blog Topic — Mind Map Review.

Scot