Lord knows, I do love me some Alphasmart goodness when I write. The instant-on, the complete word processing focus, the incredible battery life: it’s all good.
It pre-supposes, however, that I know what I want to write before I turn it on.
That’s a problem for me sometimes. Sure, I may bang out a little poetry or the beginnings of a short story with ease, but when I want to really get down to brass tacks and write something big, I end up stymied.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for the NaNoWriMo “more words at any cost” method when it comes to my yearly authorial mental enema. NMinus is a testimony to that, after all.
But when I want to write something that’s all complex and thematic and stuff, something that has to hang together under scrutiny, something that might — dare I say — reach toward being literature … Then, I want to know where I’m headed first.
That’s when I turn to my favorite writing tool in the entire universe, aside from my fingers themselves. I turn to Freemind.
The exchange rate on pictures being whatit is, I offer a thumbnail for your clicky enjoyment. You may be able to tell already that this is a mind map: a useful way to organize ideas and concepts, show the relationships between them, and cluster them together. This map is for a De Profundis game I wanted to examine and pull some ideas from, perhaps with the goal to rekindle it and build on the ideas that most intrigued me.
Gone are the days of dropped ideas, or worse yet, ideas buried in mounds of scrap papers or forgotten notebooks. My characters are developed. My plots are thick. My themes are consistent. Ideas go on their own little branch of the map for later referral or pruning. Source documents can be noted and grouped.
With a map of where my story is going, the time I spend at my Alphasmart becomes exponentially more productive.
The two things I love about Freemind:
* It’s easy to group related things together, either by putting them in the same branch or drawing arrows between them across branches.
* It’s easy to clean up the map and focus on any particular branch, because the branches are collapsible.
I also love the fact that it’s free as in beer/speech, and that it’s Java. It runs on everything. Even off a USB key.
I’ve handled lots of projects through Freemind, and it always pays off. Stories, script breakdowns, custom RPG adventures: any complex idea lends itself well to be mapped out this way. Definitely a major tool in my writing kit.
Freemind Home Page
