As someone with LONGTIME diagnosed ADHD (If I didn't self admit this, trust me, it would become apparent with time) I cannot stress enough how much having a digital recreation of a physical map for story writing helps with executive dysfunction. Highly recommend.
As a longtime Dork, a fan of Weird Fiction, and an Oldhead by internet terms, it should surprise no one that Remedy is one of my favorite game developers, and I am DEEPLY attached to Alan Wake as a franchise purely off of its deep analysis of the craft of writing and psychological analysis.
When playing Alan Wake 2 (Minor Spoilers for game mechanics I guess?) as the titular title character Alan Wake, you are stuck in a nightmare dreamscape shaped by your own art. As such, you constantly return to his Writers Room where, partially because its a real tactic, and partially because its a video game, you rearrange story elements on a massive chalkboard to effect the game world itself.
Image attached for all my visual learners out there:
Now, I've struggled a lot sometimes with my drafts and organizing my thoughts. I've loved writing for a long time. The closest I ever got to seeing something like this in media before was, admittedly, being shown the Always Sunny clip of the Pepe Silvia rant. While funny, being shown someone's mental shattering it turns out, not the most effective way to teach a writer a valuable tool.
Turning it into a puzzle mechanic utilized by an actual writer however? Very Cool.
Where am I going with this?
As it turns out, there are several programs out there that allow you to basically replicate this kind of visual story mapping out there if you just know where to look. One of the better ones, admittedly, I actually did not find out about until after college, where in my corporate job someone pulled it out (A business major friend of mine) as a part of a team building exercise.
(This is not a paid advertisement)
What it is, I hope, a call to those who did not know about it that it is THERE. What it does is give you a nice big infinite void, and allow you to not only draw lines and flow tables and make nice little titles on things, but as you can see, toss digital physical sticky notes around and map things out VISUALLY.
I cannot stress how much this has helped.
Everything to the left of the center line was initial plot building for future drafts of Project Clown Crown. Side characters, plots, building up little color coded stacks of each note so that I know what corresponds to what.
Everything to the right? That's two days of manic work baby. As it turns out, much to my friend recently pointing out, Image and Dark Horse accept open pitches so long as you have an artist team, an elevator pitch for the work, and a solid 5 pages of sequential story telling that summarizes what you plan to do in the first arc.
This normally probably would have taken me a month of staring at a blank google/word doc until I came up with some kind of nigh-incomprehensible bulleted list spanning for pages. Instead, I can pump these ideas down visually now in a couple of hours, rearrange them, note them in shorthand and physically place them in space on timelines for my story.
I haven't felt this kind of power as a writer in ages. Admittedly, part of it is probably a friend actually thinking I have something worth pitching. Part of it is an own sense of self accomplishment and actually being able to visually SEE progress, rather than it just be abstracted word counts on a page.
Am I saying Miro is the only solution? No, I'm sure there are other tools or even better tools out there. All I'm saying is that this worked for me, and I will probably take a lot of my other drafts that I've been struggling with and do something similar with them. If you're like me, and you're struggling with writing or you've hit a wall and haven't tried visually mapping things out, give it a go. Can't hurt to try.
Anyway, I suppose I broke the surprise from Entry 4.1 early here, but yeah, looks like I might be trying to turn Project Clown Crown into an actual piece of media. About damn time I try to publish something. Can't call myself an Author without some body of work.
