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Creative Mind Mapping for Novelists

Creative Mind Mapping for Novelists
Brainstorming ideas seems to be one of the hardest stages in the writing process for many novelists. As I discussed in a previous post, this storm of ideas that flash and thunder in our brains often appears unruly and difficult to harness. I introduced the practice of mind mapping, which is used across many disciplines—such as in classrooms for essay writing and in business meetings to problem-solve. Mind mapping can be used in just about any situation when ideas need to be reeled in and transformed into practical application. Mind Map on the Macro and Micro Levels I’ve never seen anyone specifically focus on novel structure or fiction plotting via mind mapping, so I’m going to show you ways I feel mind mapping can be useful for the novelist. Going deeper, you can merge mind maps, which I’ll explain in a later post. Brainstorming Characters and Theme Together I’m a character-driven novelist, so I always first start with character ideas along with theme. Focusing on Theme in Your Mind Map Related:  Writing Resources

OmPad: Free, beautiful, minimal and inspirational writing web app Welcome to OmPad! Free minimal writing app that helps you focus and concentrate on writing great content. Format your text with headings, bold, italic, links, images, lists, code and quotes. Customization: Change the theme, size, font and width by hovering over the OmPad logo (bottom left)Formatting: Select the text and a floating toolbar will show up.Images: Type in a URL, select it and click the image buttonHTML: Click the bottom right word-count You can start editing this text you are reading right now, go ahead, click here and start typing! "This is the best writing app ever, and it's free!" Put your browser on full screen mode for an immersive distraction-free experience. Simple, powerful, beautiful. There is no Save button, everything is auto-saved as you type. Made with ❤ by Xavi Esteve

750 Words - Write every day. How to write a book - Now Novel 10 Great Tools for Creating eBooks July 10, 2013 by Ronda Bowen Today, eBooks are popular tools for content marketers who want to get their message across to a wider audience. Not only can offering a free eBook be helpful for building a mailing list of prospective customers and clients, but a well-crafted eBook can also demonstrate that you have the knowledge, resources, and skills your customer needs. There are a number of tools available to help individuals design professional-looking eBooks. We even have a guide here on Rock the Deadline with tips for creating an eBook in Microsoft Word. Some of the apps on this list, such as Evernote, are best suited for pulling together your thoughts and ideas while others, such as PagePlus, are excellent layout and design tools. Evernote Evernote is a popular program for organizing thoughts, notes, websites, images, and PDF files in one place. You can keep track of your ideas, outlines, and to-do lists in one place, treating the program like an electronic filing cabinet. PagePlus Issuu

Calmly Writer: The Ultimate Distraction-Free Writing Tool Christopher Alexander Christopher Alexander Christopher Wolfgang Alexander (born October 4, 1936 in Vienna, Austria) is an architect noted for his theories about design, and for more than 200 building projects in California, Japan, Mexico and around the world. Reasoning that users know more about the buildings they need than any architect could, he produced and validated (in collaboration with Sarah Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein) a "pattern language" designed to empower anyone to design and build at any scale. Alexander is often overlooked by texts in the history and theory of architecture because his work intentionally disregards contemporary architectural discourse.[1] As such, Alexander is widely considered to occupy a place outside the discipline, the discourse, and the practice of Architecture. Education[edit] Alexander grew up in England and started his education in sciences. Honors[edit] Alexander was awarded the First Gold Medal for Research by the American Institute of Architects in 1972.

23 Fiction Writing Ideas That Will Revitalize Your Story Posted by Melissa Donovan on September 29, 2015 · Refresh your story with these fiction writing ideas. Sometimes our fiction writing projects dry up. The characters turn out to be flat, the plot becomes formulaic, and the story suddenly seems lackluster. This is when a lot of writers give up and file their half-finished manuscripts into a bottom drawer never to be seen again. What a waste of time and energy. Before giving up on a project, why not try to resurrect it? Fiction Writing Ideas Today’s writing ideas will help you enhance stories that are suffering from a variety of maladies ranging from boring plots to unrealistic characters. Give your characters more than a goal. Got Any Fiction Writing Ideas? Got any tips or ideas to add? About Melissa DonovanMelissa Donovan is a website designer and copywriter.

Printing Press The interactive Printing Press is designed to assist students in creating newspapers, brochures, and flyers. Teachers and students can choose from several templates to publish class newspapers, informational brochures, and flyers announcing class events. Text added to the templates can be modified using a simple WYSIWYG editor, which allows students to choose text features, such as font size and color. Documentation for the Printing Press includes instructions for using the tool. Customized versions of the tool, which include additional instructions and more focused choices, are included with some lessons. A basic planning sheet is available to help students gather ideas before working on this interactive tool. Grades 3 – 12 | Student Interactive | Writing & Publishing Prose Flip Book The Flip Book is designed to allow users to type and illustrate tabbed flip books up to ten pages long. Grades K – 12 | Student Interactive | Writing & Publishing Prose Stapleless Book Shared Writing

WRITING TOOLS Character Pyramid Tool (PDF) Visualize your character’s FLAWS & associated behaviors (for a deeper understanding of this tool, please reference The Negative Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Flaws) Character Target Tool (PDF) Organize and group your character’s POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES by category: moral, achievement, interactive or identity (for a greater understanding of this tool, please reference The Positive Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Attributes) Character Profile Questionnaire (PDF) Not your average character questionnaire! Reverse Backstory Tool (PDF) Work backwards to find your character’s wound, needs & lie (for a deeper understanding of this tool, please reference The Negative Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Flaws) Weak Verb Converter Tool (PDF) Transform all those generic, boring verbs into power verbs Scene Revision/Critique Tool Level 1 & Level 2 (PDF) A ‘light’ and ‘in-depth’ revision checklist for creating compelling characters and scenes

Statistics on Poverty, Urbanization and Slums | P.a.p.-Blog, Human Rights Etc. Content 1. Trends in urbanization2. Numbers of slum dwellers3. 1. Urbanization is on the rise. Two hundred years ago, Peking was the only city in the world with a population of a million. The half of the world’s population that lives in cities occupies only approximately 2.7% of the world’s land area. (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) Lagos and Cairo are Africa’s largest cities. ^ back to top 2. Many of the city dwellers, especially in the Third World, live in slum conditions. (source, click image to enlarge) The UN estimates that the number of people living in slums passed 1 billion in 2007 and could reach 1.39 billion in 2020, although there are large variations among regions. (source) (source, click image to enlarge) In most parts of the world, the proportion of urban populations living in slums has gone down: The proportion of the world’s urban population living in slums has fallen from nearly 40% a decade ago to less than a third today. (source) 3.

Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do. Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Procrastination is an alluring siren taunting you to google the country where Balki from Perfect Strangers was from, and to arrange sticky notes on your dog in the shape of hilarious dog shorts. The blank white page. Mark Twain once said, “Show, don’t tell.” Finding a really good muse these days isn’t easy, so plan on going through quite a few before landing on a winner. There are two things more difficult than writing. It’s so easy to hide in your little bubble, typing your little words with your little fingers on your little laptop from the comfort of your tiny chair in your miniature little house. It’s no secret that great writers are great readers, and that if you can’t read, your writing will often suffer. Available in print withThe Best of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Evernote, OneNote, and Beyond: The 12 Best Note-Taking Apps Where do you put your thoughts, your ideas, or the name of a movie someone recommended? If you write them down or otherwise capture them, you get an accurate record that you can always refer to rather than rely on a faulty memory. The place to put all this information and more is in a note taking app. Note taking apps are the digital equivalent of notebooks, and because they're digital, they can do more for you than paper ever could. Editor's Note: Originally published in October 2015 by author Jimmy Daly and then updated in April 2017, we've updated this post with new selections and app descriptions. What Makes a Great Note Taking App? To find the best note taking apps, we started with a list of about 35 contenders and whittled our way down to the 10 best based on a few criteria. All the apps chosen for this list met a standard for being easy to set up and use. One final point for consideration was whether the app offered a unique experience. The Best Note Taking Apps Bear (iOS, macOS)

How To Write A Novel Using The Snowflake Method Writing a novel is easy. Writing a good novel is hard. That’s just life. Frankly, there are a thousand different people out there who can tell you how to write a novel. In this article, I’d like to share with you what works for me. This page is the most popular one on my web site, and gets over a thousand page views per day, so you can guess that a lot of people find it useful. Good fiction doesn’t just happen, it is designed. For a number of years, I was a software architect designing large software projects. I claim that that’s how you design a novel — you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story. If you’re like most people, you spend a long time thinking about your novel before you ever start writing. But before you start writing, you need to get organized. Step 1) Take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of your novel. When you later write your book proposal, this sentence should appear very early in the proposal. Some hints on what makes a good sentence:

Lagos / Koolhaas Lagos' population is expected to reach 24 million people by 2020, which would make it the third largest city in the world. Every hour, 21 new inhabitants set out to start a life in the city, a life that is highly unpredictable and requires risk taking, networking and improvisation as essential strategies for survival. Rem Koolhaas - winner of architecture's Nobel, the Pritzker Architecture Prize - is a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Harvard. LAGOS / KOOLHAAS follows Koolhaas during his research in Lagos over a period of two years as he wanders through the city, talking with people and recognizing the problems with water, electricity and traffic. For example, in most North American cities we grumble about the traffic and turn up the CD. For Koolhaas, the key to understanding a city such as Lagos is the realization that it is not the controllable result of Western planning. "Highly Recommended!

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