Generally my story ideas come from all the traditional places: what I’ve read, TV, movies, newspaper/magazine articles, a face or action from someone that I’ve glimpsed.

Recently I’ve been trying to organize my brain into how I’m going to prepare for what I’m writing. I’m generally a pantser but I know from doing NaNoWriMo that planning beforehand has kept the story flowing with a beginning, middle and end.

Now that I want to plan better how do I go about it? Will I keep a notebook – one notebook for all ideas or separate notebooks for each story I’m working on? Do I want pen and paper or electronic?

Mindmapping

I recently tried mindmapping and I like that visual element for seeing character relationships but it didn’t really do what I wanted. Plus, when I map out ideas I kind of just write in a stream of consciousness type of way and just let the ideas pour out of my head in no particular order. Creating the map elements was also kind of ‘eh’.

Evernote

Over the weekend I stumbled on an Evernote blog about creating a moodboard. Any tips on how to use Evernote more efficiently are happy finds for me. The blog discusses gathering images, text, colors in one notebook then creating a collage in a graphics program and making it into a pdf. Reading that was one of those pinging moments of inspiration in my brain.

So, this week I’ve been persevering with creating my story notes in Evernote. I’ve created a notebook, compiled character sheets, a plot page and have just put together a moodboard of images to save as a pdf to save back into Evernote where I can refer back to it whenever I need a jolt of inspiration about the story. Tagging everything, so all my research I’ve found and saved, was also another brain pinging moment. It makes the process of finding anything related to the story so much easier. I was always a half-hearted tagger but am now making sure I keep this as a good habit.

Plus, Evernote is on all my devices so whenever an idea strikes I’m more able to stop whatever else I’m doing and jot it down.

I know I’ll never give up pen and paper and my ideas notebook but expanding it electronically has opened up a new way of enhancing my creativity.

For the Weekly Writing Prompt inspiration from Studio30Plus