October's Craft Theme

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Hello! It’s a new month, and that means it’s time for a new theme for our weekly craft posts. Since next month is November and a lot of people will be taking part in NANOWRIMO, I decided a good theme for this month would be Prewriting. That is to say, we’ll be exploring different tools and activities you can use to prepare for writing a story.

Obviously, Plotters like to create a plan before they write, but just about every type of writer does some sort of preparation. Whether it’s creating character profiles, world building, creating a collage for the story, or a good old outline, there are lots of ways you can get your head into the story before you sit down to write it.

As it happens, I’m at the beginning of a new project so these ideas are at the top of my mind as I try to figure out what the heck I’m doing with this story. As you probably know by now, I’m a puzzler, so I don’t outline before I write. But I do a lot of research, visualizing, and world building to prepare—I call this my sandbox building phase. I may not know the story beats but I know a lot about the world it happens in and who lives there before anything happens on the page.

This month the weekly posts will be divided into subthemes.

Today: Prewriting Tools

Next Week: World Building as Story Prep

Last Week: Character Building

Below is a list of various tools and resources I use in my story prep phase.

• Scapple: This is a great mind mapping tool to capture your ideas. Since each of the Prospero books was based on a different alchemical stage, I’d create a themed mind map for each book that combined the themes of the alchemy stage and some of the general ideas and images I had for the story itself.

• Pinterest: I create a vision board for most of my books. I do casting for the characters in addition to including setting cues and symbols. This helps me visualize the “feel” of the world and the story. It’s a container for miscellaneous research I do, and it’s useful in helping my cover designers see what I envisioned. Plus, once the book is out I can share them with my readers as extras.

• Music Streaming Service: I create playlists for my stories. Sometimes I have different playlists for different characters or parts of a story (ex. fight scenes vs romantic scenes). These songs help me get in the right headspace and get in the story zone. Like the collages, I can also share these with my readers once the book is out.

• Notebook: This is pretty basic writer stuff, but I never am far from a notebook or my phone (using the notes app). I’m constantly writing little snippets of dialog and scene ideas early on.

• Working Journal: I keep a journal on my projects in the story’s Scrivener file where I write about the process of working on it. I stole this idea from Vicki Pettersson, who has a great video on the topic. Vicki also has a great video specifically on prewriting here.

What are your favorite tools for capturing those early story ideas? Share them in comments!