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]

I do a lot of brainstorming in the car. I tend to write out detailed scenes in my head and then I gotta get them down when I get home.

I brainstorm when I'm in bed before I sleep too. I have ever since I was like 4.

I had a job once that was pulling staples from papers 40 hrs a week. That was awesome for the writeyness. :)

What I like about the mapping is that I get the bones of the fic visable and strong and then I can build the fic around those. I see my weaknesses earlier, I think.