Organising Ideas

One of the great pleasures of being a writer in any medium is the not-writing part; the bit where you get to play with your ideas, brainstorm them, organise them and categorise them, without actually committing anything to the draft.

And so that's where we are now. Licensed procrastination. You’ve had an idea, you’ve walked around with the characters in your head for a while. The voice and tone of the piece should have started to solidify for you. And now you need to flesh it out, do whatever research seems necessary, start to link things together in order, ultimately, to come up with some kind of a structure.

This is one of the fun parts, for me at least. I just have to be careful that it doesn't expand so much that it becomes all I ever actually do. This is a real danger.

The internet is rife with articles on how to organise notes and ideas, and there doesn't seem to be much of a consensus. There are tonnes of systems and apps out there, catering to every possible taste and workflow. To go through them all would be exhausting, so I'm just going to talk about the ones I use and the stages at which I use them…