Visualising your plot threads

Grab a pen: it's time to draw squiggly lines

I had a strange compulsion about a week ago. I wanted to visualise my books’ plots. This might be useful, I thought, or provide some interesting insights into my storytelling techniques. Or it might just be kinda cool.

Grab some paper and a pen. We’re going to draw some squiggly lines together, so that we can then nod in a scientific manner.

How to go about it, then? I initially tried using Miro, but it proved to be extremely fiddly:

The main issue was figuring out what I was actually visualising. In the Miro attempt to plot my book The Mechanical Crown, I started off with the three main characters, in different colours. I then created a new block for each plot development.

It was clearly too much detail, and would take ages. It also wasn’t really showing me anything visually that I didn’t already know.

I’d thought about using Twine, the interactive fiction tool, which can make useful branching narratives. Here’s a project I worked on as an interactive prequel to The Mechanical Crown back in the day:

Looks quite exciting, doesn’t it? It was still going to be a lot of work to recreate the book in this form, though. (you can play that mini game here btw)

There are other tools I spotted, too, like Aeon and Plottr, but both looked far too rigid. I wasn’t interested in something to help me plan a current or future project (I have Scrivener for that), but rather a way to visualise completed projects.

I then stumbled upon this XKCD comic:

The key thing here was in how they decided to map the stories. Time is on the horizontal, and than ‘relative geography’ is on the vertical. This depicts how characters come into contact with each other through the course of the story. Annotations then highlight key plot moments.

I tried using various digital art tools to recreate XKCD’s approach, all of which were a massive faff.

Then I remembered the existence of pencils, and had a go at using them on a slim, tablet-like device called paper. And it worked! I then tidied it up a bit and coloured it digitally.

This is far rougher and less fancy than XKCD’s, but here is the graph for No Adults Allowed, my road trip adventure set in a world in which adults no longer exist (spoilers, obviously):

Look at that! How fun. Notably, it’s very obvious that the story is a road trip with a core ensemble of characters who mostly go on the journey together - at least until some unravelling right at the tail end. On the vertical you can see the main geographical areas they pass through.

And here’s one for The Mechanical Crown (again, massive spoilers):

This is where I got quite excited, because the chart for this story looks so different! It was at this point that I started to find these things actually quite insightful, beyond just being a bit of fun.

TMC is an epic fantasy adventure, with a huge cast of characters (only a handful are shown here). The characters go on a big journey, there are multiple plot lines running throughout, and it all comes together at the end. Navigation, exploration and mountains play a large part in the story, so it amused me to see this visualisation take on the appearance of a mountain peak.

The best thing is that it’s quite quick and easy to do. Have a go at it yourself! Sheet of paper, pencil, then

1. Write down the names of your main characters on the far left of the page, with their vertical positions representing their relative physical proximity to each other

2. Draw squiggly lines for each character, showing how they move towards and away from each other. The page from left to right represents the progression of the story

3. You can annotate major events, and add location keys on the far right

4. If a character dies, their line ends with a dot

Do share your creations if you visualise your own works. Put links in the comments, or share them over on Notes!

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MEANWHILE.

Last week’s post about ‘fixing’ the Substack fiction experience went down well. Even Substack CEO

Hamish McKenzie

foolishly clicked the like button, so I’m assuming every one of my suggestions will be implemented in the next month or two.

Here it is again if you missed it:

I’ve also been working on a revised version of the No Adults Allowed front cover and have been receiving some very useful feedback over on Notes. Have I mentioned how much I value notes? Click into this to check out the new version:

A couple of ebook giveaways that might be of interest:

• Free Science Fiction & Fantasy Reads

• Sci-Fi And Fantasy Giveaway

Have good weeks, everyone. See you on Friday.