New toys for my BRAIN

[ladyjanelly]

I feel like I"m on the verge of a sudden jump in fic writing quality and quantity.

The thing is, I've always had ideas.  Just 90% of those ideas had no legs--like--yeah, AU J2 are interesting together but I'm sort of lacking anything besides character development.  I end up with two boys loving each other in a vacuum. 

So the hubby has been teaching me some tools that he's learned over the years (seriously, the man works 40 hrs a week and can still turn out 100,000 words of original fic in 5 months). 

I started with making mind-maps to sort of brainstorm the story. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MindMapGuidlines.JPG

But I kept having this little line that didn't go anywhere labeled "Plot" and yeah. That's no good.  So next came wish-list-conflicts, where I write down all the characters' top ten things they need in life and see where those conflict.  Which means I need to have more than just the main pairing as characters, which expands the fic already.  I'm still sort of short on endings--the part where I envision the characters after the conflict is ended, or what exactly the characters' best case scenario is.  But still, it feels like I've got more story before these ideas poop out on me.

So I've been doing those two games on my old dead-ended fics and now I'm having new ideas and mapping and wish-listing those, and yeah.  I need to actually start the writing part of writing now.

Comments

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

What I do is put the idea of the fic in the center circle and then draw a couple lines off in all directions.

Start general, naming the lines like "Characters" and "Events" and "Setting" and then let the lines branch off into finer and finer details until you run out of page. When you do, you start a new page with a new map with a finer focus, for instance, "Characters" can be its own map.

It really helped fill in the vacant spaces in my ideas. Helped me see the imbalances and where I needed more meat and details.

[taniapretender.livejournal.com]

wow, that's amazing! I think it's gonna be sooo helpful finish my bigbang fic!
Thanks :D

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

I like that it's such a visual representation of the fic in a non-linear form. It really helps me see the gaps.