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: