3. How I “Thought-Dump”
When you decide to make a story, whether it is a light novel, manga, movie, etc., it is best to plan out your story’s basic composition. Planning will help make your story a lot better, making it feel more fluid, creative, and unique. It can also help you avoid plot holes, inconsistencies with your characters, and writer’s block.
My favorite way of planning out my story is to do a “thought-dump.” Thought-dumping is taking any idea or thought and writing it down. The idea can be good or bad; just dump your thoughts onto a document. For example, I wanted a floating castle in my story, but it seemed illogical to add it. It just ruined some of the elements in the world I created. I ignored my brain and just added it anyway. After some thought, I found a way to add that floating castle. I tweaked a few things in my story, changed some characters, added some history, and made the castle significantly relevant to my arc and the whole series’s main plot. What I initially thought was a mistake ended up being one of my greatest decisions.
The best way I thought-dump is through a tool called Milanote. Milanote does not sponsor this post, but it is simply my favorite website, and I had to share it. Anyway, Milanote is a tool I use to organize my ideas and put them on a board. This board helps me better visualize my thoughts.
You can add folder-type boards to organize your ideas. You can also select a category for your board to use pre-made cards. For example, I created a new board and categorized it as “characters.” This allowed me to use template cards specially made for characters. The character cards allowed me to upload a picture for my character profile with a description of their goals, personalities, habits, and looks. I have made nearly a dozen characters to get a better understanding of them.
You can do the same with other card templates such as the novel plan, story outline, world-building, and story map. It is a really effective way to develop whatever I want in my story.
For my thought-dumps, I use an empty board and randomly place note cards to write my ideas. I can color-code these note cards to understand better what relevance they have. I now have about 50 note cards, some of which have up to 300 words. These thought-dumps can be anything: describing a character or his/her actions, an idea of a plot twist, outlining the power system of the world, anything you want. I am still in the planning/thought-dump phase, but once I’m near the end of it, I will connect all these notes in chronological order. This will assist me in reviewing which bits of information work, which ones don’t make sense. It will also help me check for plot holes within my ideas.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the “Ask Me Anything” tab on my Tumblr page.
