Organizing Thoughts

How do you organize the chaos of your own mind? I generally don’t since I’m really good at multi-tasking. But, I have a lot of projects to plan- job hunting, getting Certificates in Editing and Graphic Design, working on my second novel, to name a few. The brain warehouse became cluttered and everything was screaming at me at the same time. I couldn’t focus on anything. Something had to change.

from Mind Tools

Mind Mapping is sort of what I wanted but I’ve never been big on creating charts and graphs for myself. Tried it, never helped. Reading an article about storyboards gave me more inspiration.

Buy a push pin board and dedicate wall space to my projects.

This had to be organized carefully. I don’t want my apartment looking a mess. It turned out better than expected.

One area is for my novel. It has details of my world- how it has changed from the first novel, history and the difference between the two main creatures. Since I’m a very visual person, I also included pictures for inspiration. To make sure it wasn’t totally boring, I gave the text fun colors and added visual effects.

I also listed all my characters- describing their personalities and soul wounds- my new favorite phrase. I learned it from Diane Carlisle’s post A Writer’s Journey – The Wounded Soul. You never really appreciate just how many characters you have until you write them all out. This took longer than I expected but those two elements (personality and soul wound) forced me think deeper about my characters and their lives.

The world building board helped me gain some perceptive too. Since creating it, I’ve developed more history. Organizing the warehouse freed my mind to create more scenes.

I dedicated another board to the elements of my other projects. Already, there’s too much information to fit on the boards but, I organized the papers around them so it still looks nice. This has gone a long way towards organizing my thoughts.