Learning to Plot

I’ve been writing for years, sometimes less and sometimes more, sometimes fannish and sometimes not, but I’ve always been convinced that I have a hard time with ideas. I get a kernel, and then I kind of get stuck trying to figure out how to thread that idea out into something bigger. The times I work best in that department tend to be when I can bounce ideas off someone else — spin things bigger and bigger in the course of a conversation, and feed off someone else a little bit. I always kind of thought that meant I wasn’t any good at the idea part.

Slowly, I am figuring out that I just need to work my butt off at it, mostly.

I need more practice. I need to actually use tools like mind-mapping (or spider diagrams, or whatever you want to call them). And I’m getting better at that, and (what a shock) that means I’m getting better at getting the ideas to work out, too. It’s slow. And it’s kind of annoying, and not nearly as fun as the moments when things just pop out of nowhere, but then the connections start getting made, and that IS just as fun as the out-of-nowhere stuff, and it sure as hell chugs along further.

So I’m working on it.

One of my big hold-ups regarding mapping/diagramming had always been that I hated the wasting of paper… and also that my diagrams tended to squish up in funny directions, threads running into each other and needing to be moved and it really bothered me that I couldn’t just use a computer program so that it would be easier to organize and make look nice. Fortunately (and I swear, I’m not getting paid by them… although if they wanted to offer I might not refuse…), Scapple finally has a Windows version, and ohmyfreakinggod, I love it. It is everything I want in diagramming software. I can put things down, move them around, disconnect and reconnect ideas or just leave them floating, start with whatever I want and it doesn’t get fussy about that thing needing to be a hierarchical top… it’s brilliant.

So if you use diagramming for your own writing, or if you’re curious about it, check out their free trial. And if you use some other method, let me know what it is! I’m curious to see what people do and how they make the ideas flow.