Tag: Dropbox

Navigating the Mind of a Storyteller

Kim Koning, Notes on Wrestling The Muse, Thursday Tips, Tools

Picture this scene. You are lying in bed trying to get to sleep. You just start falling into the land of zzz’s and BOING! An idea has popped into your mind. It is the voice of a character. Just as you try to turn over and fall back asleep, it is already 4am and you have had about 5 minutes of sleep, a picture of the next scene in your WIP pops into your head. The first voice of the character you heard has nothing to do with your current story. Which thread of thought do you follow down the winding road of imagination? The new one or the current one? But what if you want to follow both? How do you choose? None of these thoughts are even that cohesive, just snippets that are invading your sleep-deprived mind. It is not as if they make any sense.

You need a Mind-Map.

Mind-mapping is one of my favourite ways to work through all those detours in the road to a great story. It is the law of Imagination that just when you are working on your current story, a brilliant idea or three hit you simultaneously. This is when I pull out my mind-map.

If you have never mind-mapped before, it is like note-taking but in a more visual form than notes. It is notes in picture form. Mind-mapping notes are perfect for those barely cohesive thoughts that you know will lead you down some wondrous path but first you have to connect all the dots. So out comes a mind-map.

Mind Maps just Zing for me. I am not a big note taker. Even at school, I detested pages and pages of notes. Instead I mind-mapped all my subjects. With mind-mapping you can zone out the unimportant and the fluffy, but you can zoom in on the essentials. You have to use bright colours. I have a pencil-case of coloured markers and highlighters specifically for mind-mapping. The great thing about mind-mapping a story is that you can put the mind-map in a place where you can always see it and that way always have a clear view of your story’s plot.

I use Mind-Maps to map my character profiles, my plot, the story arc, the back story, the setting. You get the drift? You can mind-map anything. It does not take long and you can fit what you might take over 10 pages of written notes to put into one mind-map.

The great thing about a mind-map is that it can also navigate you through the tricky parts in your WIP. If you are starting to feel lost in the story and need to figure out whether you have taken a wrong detour or just a more scenic route, you can refer back to your mind-map. It works the same way a road map does when you are driving. One look down at it is all it takes to steer you back onto the right road and miss the potholes.

I use an art-poster pad for my mind-maps. That way they all stay together. I can also keep it next to my bed so that I can jot down that stray thought (path) into a current or a new mind-map at 3am in the morning. Strangely enough that is the most active time in my imagination for new stories to germinate. But you could use any pad of paper or even a notebook for mind-maps. I do advise using unlined paper though.

I love my software so you know that I have some digital software for mind-maps to mention too. These are the top three I prefer to use:

FreeMind – An open source free download for that will work on any operation system whether you use apple, windows or any other OS. This is one of the simplest software programs to use. There is barely any learning curve and it is perfect for you if you are not big on complicated software with all the frills and whistles. This will do the job.

Mind-Node – A mac download that is available both online or in the Apple App store. There is both a free and a pro (paid) version. There is also a touch version that is downloadable for either your iPod touch or your iPad. The one drawback of this is that it is only available to mac users. Sorry pc folks.

Mind-Meister – A free or a paid download that you can sync through your pc/mac, your laptop/notebook, your iPod touch, your iPad and even your twitter/Facebook. The great thing with Mind-meister is that like Dropbox it is a secure online storage. You can also, like Dropbox, share and collaborate on mind-maps with other people though an online account. This one is a new favourite of mine.

Try Mind-Mapping. Whether you try the old-fashioned pen and paper way – make sure you have multiple coloured markers for this, it only adds to the fun – or one of the digital software, you will look at plotting in a whole new light. For those pantsters who cannot imagine taking copious notes this might be the perfect introduction to a very effective way to plot and still give you that freedom of just letting the imagination roam. Your imagination can still roam, you can just mark down the highlights in bright colours so that you don’t lose those wanderings. You could even draw pictures if that is the way you prefer to think. For plotters, you will love the new way to plot because you get to indulge in plotting that story arc or character profile but taking less time to do it.

Try Mind-Mapping out and let me know whether you had fun.

It might just revolutionize your next story. 

What’s your favourite way to make sense of those random 3am imaginings? Do you mind-map already? Are you a note-taker/note-scrawler? Do you use a dictaphone/recorder to tape your thoughts. Share with me how you make sense of those 3am thoughts. 

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Thursday Tips & Tools | HELP! S.O.S.

Blogging, Kim Koning, Notes on Wrestling The Muse, Thursday Tips, Tools

HELP! S.O.S (Save Our Stories)

We all have had this at one point or another…no I am not talking about Writers’ Block

nor am I talking about instructions on head massage over SKYPE or a G+ Video Hangout…

The thing, you thought would never happen to you has happened!

Your hard worked over WIP is lost not to mention all the countless hours of research. You may have updated a program and through a glitch all your work in the old program was lost. You may have spilt your necessary mug of coffee all over your keyboard and the machine fried. You may have opened one of those hilarious forwards from your Aunt May and it spread tentacles of a dangerous virus right throughout your system and all your files have been wiped clean or deleted. No matter how it happens, it happens to every writer who works with a laptop/computer. If it has not happened to you yet, do not think you are one of the lucky ones, it will happen and it will also happen at the most inconvenient time. You have just got to a crucial point in your WIP that unveils the whole twist in the story’s tale. You may have just typed end on your final edited draft but not yet transferred it to any disk-key or printed it yet. Whatever way it happens, it spells disaster. Yes I hear you say….”It’s ok. I back-up.”. When was the last time you backed up? What did you back up to? Did you back up right before the computer/program crashed? Did you back up to an email folder on your computer or even an alternate folder on your computer? Now, before rushing off to back off, I need your attention for just 5 minutes more. I just need to tell you one more thing…

DROPBOX

You see I tell you all the above because I speak from bitter experience. But what is experience unless we can learn from it. This has happened to me twice. The first time was a disaster because although I did backup, the backup folder was on the same computer that crashed. I lost everything. Research, articles, the WIP’s, emails and yes I lost the backup too. It all disappeared into a dark vortex of hot lava when my computer was fried from onboard chargers on an international flight. The worst thing was that I had over 800 brand new photographs from my trip which I was planning on sifting through when I got home for a travel article. The disaster was out of my hands in this instance. A clever IT guy managed to get a lot of it back but the most important stuff was frizzed and burnt out when all the electrical components in my laptop were fried by the onboard chargers.

Then after much pulling out of hair and stamping of feet and many french translations, I took a deep breath and bought an Apple laptop. (All of my previous had been Windows PCs.) Then I started backing up to external sources and I got very pedantic about backing up. I backed up before exiting every work session. I am still a tad on the obsessive side with backing up.

Then this year I found Dropbox at a friend’s invite in my inbox. When I read up on it, I was skeptical of using an online storage facility. How could I be sure nobody else would access my documents/research/photographs. So I ignore the invitation and then I had a second scare hit me with a program update that unfortunately deleted all my work. Even though I had it all backed up externally this time, it still took me hours restoring it. So what happened? I didn’t wait for the third disaster. I accepted the dropbox invitation and signed up immediately.

Ever since then, fingers crossed, with no third disaster I am breathing easily. I am not saying nothing else will go wrong. It might. But now I know that all my documents are safely uploaded and updated to dropbox. It is even done automatically. Once you have loaded up a document to Dropbox, every time you make changes to or update it, the document is automatically updated in Dropbox. Dropbox is online storage but it also lives in a little window on your finder or explorer on the computer. So you do not even need to open up the online storage to view the folders there, you just go to the dropbox folder on your own computer. With dropbox you can also synchronize all your mobile pda’s, iPads, netbooks or iPods to the same dropbox folder. This in turn will synchronize with your main computer/laptop. So wherever you write and whatever you write on, it will be both backed up and updated to Dropbox and will also immediately be available on your main computer as well. You can back up practically anything to Dropbox: documents, images, graphics, music, you name it and you can back it up. Dropbox is now so popular that many word-processing programs have a dropbox option that will sync with your dropbox.

Your work is also 99.9% safe. (There is no such thing as 100% safe.) It is also very secure. Your account is password activated. You can then also put different passwords on each of your files that you upload. If you wish to make the work public, there is that option too. Also if you wish to share something with a colleague or another writer or just share some images/music with friends and family, you can create a shared folder that is also password activated and is only accessible to you and the other person. This is really great for critiques.

Oh…did I mention Dropbox is free. Not just that, for every friend you invite you get extra space on your storage account. You already start off with 2GBs when you sign up but the more friends you invite, the more space you get. So tell me…have I convinced you to at least take a look at it? Here are a few more tricks that Dropbox can teach you…

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Time Saving Steps for your WIP

B.I.C., Ink Slaying, Kim Koning, Notes on Wrestling The Muse, Pencil Case, Publishing, WIP, Writing Tips

Hourglass

This evening, I received one of my daily emails called: Thought for Today. This is an email sent by the Oprah website and which I get every day. It has a mesh of little tidbits of advice, ranging from physical to mental tips, along with a daily quotation. I have realised that today’s one could be reworked and adapted to a writing-focused tips post. The original post, 4 Time-Saving tips to Start your day, is from a series called: How to have more productive mornings.

So this is my adaptation to – 4 Time Saving Steps for your W(ork)I(n)P(rogess)

  1. Work before Networking/Marketing
  2. Get Publishing focused
  3. Prep your Manuscript
  4. Buddy up with Writing Partners

Work before Networking/Marketing

Your actual writing and editing must come before everything else. Anything else is procrastination. This means that updating your Facebook/twitter is procrastination. This also includes chatting in your numerous online writer groups. Yes – this is harsh – but if you are not going to hold yourself accountable to being a producing writer, who else is going to?

Get Publishing Focused

Work out a progression plan for your writing. Even if you are only writing part-time, you still need to have a progression plan for the future. Work out your goals. You can break them up into small goal increments, I am not talking a 10 year plan here. But write from where you are right now to where you want to be in 3 months time, then where you want to go from there in another 3 months ect. The most important part of this plan is to Write It Down. A plan that is written down has far more chance of success than one that is just spoken aloud. Then once you have written down your plan of attack, print three copies. Tack one to an area that you will see at most times while working. Then give one copy to your writing partner and another copy to a non-writer who is very close to you: this may be a best friend, a spouse, a sibling, a child. That way you know that they have your goals and can hold and will hold you accountable to accomplishing them.

Prep your Manuscript

Do all the prepping you need before you start writing. Whether this be research, lucky charms, muses aligned, negative thoughts released; do it all before you start writing. That way you will not need to procrastinate by suddenly remembering you forgot a key element of research and then get sucked into the vortex of browsing in your local library or online. If you are like me, this could save you hours.

Prepping your manuscript also includes a backup plan. If you don’t know what I am talking about here, take notes and follow instructions post-haste. There is no point in getting all this lovely writing done and then losing it all because of a computer glitch or a finger-error. This is where you need to take Backing up into your prepping list. Dropbox comes in very handy for this part of prepping. In Dropbox you can create an account then backup your writing files to this online account that then syncs to all your systems: laptop/desktop/phone/pda/iPod. It is also worthwhile investing in a portable hard-drive at this point where you can also store and backup your writing.

Buddy up with Writing Partners

Whether you are writing part-time or full-time, it is vital that you have a writing buddy/partner. This person is there to hold you accountable, to be harsh with you when you need it, to be encouraging when self-doubt wants you to butcher your WIP, to give you a second pair of trusted eyes on your WIP and to word war with. So if you don’t already have a writing partner/buddy, get one and fast! These gems of critters will save your butt countless times from throwing yourself out the window or throwing yourself into a vortex of procrastination.

You may be asking what the prerequisites are for a writing partner/buddy. First, they must be willing to be one. Second, think of them like a sponsor in procrastinators’ anonymous. Third, they must be a writer. This is for your own safety. A non-writer may want to commit you to a therapist’s couch after the first week. Fourth, you must trust them implicitly and vice versa. Fifth, you must ensure they realise their role is not a cheer-leader. At times you are going to need, you will not want it but you will need it, them to be brutally honest with you. They need to be comfortable with that and you need to comfortable enough with them to accept that honesty. Do not fear if your writing partner lives in a different city, country or continent. I use Skype with my writing partners and find it works tremendously. You can also have more than one writing partner/buddy. In fact sometimes it is even better to have a couple or so. The more people to kick your butt into writing gear, the better!

So now: Go forth!

Write.

B(utt) I(n) C(hair)

Kim

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