Wednesday, January 30, 2008

outline

outline

Well I'm making some slow progress on the book I'm trying to drag together. Either that or I'm stuck in the ever so fun procrastination stage. You know the time when you might create overly elaborate, coloured and indexed study calenders. Or print out all the concepts on little bits of paper and try to organise them on a large table. Then maybe take a picture of it and talk about how you aren't actually writing anything, while shoving the bits of paper around. Anyway, that's where I'm at. The good thing about printing and shuffling them on a table is I have a much better chance to actually pull the structure together. A word processor window seems far, far too small for getting my head around all these bits of ideas in one go. The table helped. I'm just hoping I can capture all of this before the next stiff breeze. I'm glad we don't have a cat. On the lighting front, this was lit with a 580ex, off camera, triggered by the ST-E2 and bounced off the light fitting hanging above the table, giving the rather funky dappled reflected pools of light.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Good luck on the book. I use a tool that is similar to you table and scraps of paper, it is called MindManager from Mindjet. It is a brainstorming tool that allows orgaization to your thoughts. It is great for writers. It does not help with procrastination but it does allow you to have countless files of half started ideas,,, that are well organized,

Unknown said...

Hi jimbo, thanks for the comment. I've actually played with MindManager in the past (as well as the free equivalent, FreeMind) I've also drawn the occasional mind map across large sheets of paper.

I think my frustration was always the scale of what you could see at the same time - printing it out, cutting it up and moving them around on the table really let me get to grips with it, visually and literally.

I've also found what you describe to be true about mind mapping in general. It is a useful tool for capturing ideas, but maybe not so good for moving forward with them.