During last week’s mentoring class in the Book Writing World, Elizabeth had us doodle with a purpose. It was a very helpful exercise, creating a “concept map” for our novels or memoirs in progress.
A concept map is much like a child’s rendition of a spider, except with many more legs and heads. The idea is to visualize all the “parts” that make up your body of work.
Draw a big oval in the center of your blank page. Put in the title of your project. From there, draw smaller ovals, fill them in with important information and connect them with spindly arrows to or from the center.
For example, I used my novella in progress about a soccer mom going crazy in the suburbs that I have titled (tongue firmly in cheek) “When Aristotle Inclines.” Each chapter is short. Some of the best chapters are not more than a few lines in length.
Some of the ovals had the various stages found in an Aristotle Incline diagram, such as “inciting incident” and “low point” and “final challenge.” Some of the ovals paid homage to the authors whose “literary form” I’ve bent out of shape to create my piece: Lydia Davis and Mary Robison.
What surprised me were the ovals that I filled in that touched on timing and brevity: watching Comedy Central, listening to jokes and counting how many seconds elapsed between the set-up and the punch line.
What will your concept map look like? And how will you fill it?
Devi Laskar is a founding member of the Book Writing World. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, is a rabid Tar Heel basketball fan and will be reading some of her work on April 9 at the Sacramento Poetry Center in CA.
I like exercises that involve drawing. They’re a nice break from typing. I do find them a little disorienting, probably because I’m so used to dealing with words, but it’s important to break of out my comfort zone.