Mind Mapping 101
For Intelligent and Attractive People
“My mind is going. I can feel it.”
—HAL
My first instinct was to title or subtitle this article “for dummies” but not only would doing so invite a reaction from Wiley I do not wish to deal with, but also it just doesn’t make sense because Shelf Life readers are very intelligent people. So every time I find myself writing an article to introduce a new topic or tactic writers or readers may be unfamiliar with, and I find myself reaching for the qualifier “for dummies,” I try to write literally anything else in the available space. Today’s article is about mind mapping, but it is not written “for dummies.” It is written for people who are new to mind mapping, but is written with my readership of intelligent and unusually attractive people in mind.
On a related topic (ie, intelligent readers), one of my intelligent readers called me out on a certain four-letter word I use way too much, a fact of which—I admit—I was already well aware. In honor of my good friend Bill, and in response to his challenge, I shan’t be using the word in question at all in today’s Shelf Life. Perhaps you’ll notice, perhaps you won’t. Are you counting the letters in “literally”? Look, it’s not literally. It’s also not “look.” There are many words I overuse (especially words of the four-letter variety, though I mostly keep those out of Shelf Life). I know this about myself. I strive to continuously improve myself, and one cannot enter a constant state of self-improvement if one is already perfect, now, can one?
Today’s article, again, is on the subject of mind mapping—what mind mapping is (and how it differs from brainstorming), how to use it to your writing’s greatest advantage, and finally some tools I’ve tried out for you just in case you’d like to do your mind mapping digitally.
A mind map is one of many ways to graphically or visually represent a collection of ideas, such as the results of a brainstorming session. Mind mapping is not itself brainstorming, but it’s a tool you can use with brainstorming to record your thoughts in an organized way. When I brainstorm, depending on what I’m brainstorming, I might take down the ideas I generate in any number of ways:
Lists work well for rapid ideation (everyone knows I love lists).
Affinity diagrams are nice for sorting and grouping ideas into categories.
Flow charts are my favorite for processes but are also useful for anything with flowing dependencies—like family trees.
Timelines and Gantt charts are great for organizing ideas in a chronological way.
Mind maps are ideal for organizing ideas hierarchically around a single topic.
When it comes to planning out your writing, mind maps are where it’s at. (Gantt charts are incredible tools for plotting and storytelling, too, but we’ll talk about them another day.)
When mind mapping, you start with one topic or concept in the center of your map and your thoughts on the central topic branch out from the center. When I say the ideas are categorized hierarchically, I mean they graduate to smaller granularity with each interval away from the center. You begin with an overarching topic in a bubble in the center of your paper. The ideas spawned directly from the main topic each branch away in a different direction, forming bubbles around the central bubble. Then, all the ideas spawned from those subtopics branch away from the next bubble, and so on, iteratively.
A mind map is a marvelous device for planning a specific piece of writing or an entire suite of projects. Working on your memoir? Start with your working title in the center and branch out to big-picture subtopics like events, places, people, decades of your life. Epic fantasy? You’re going to have a lot of characters to juggle and a mind map is an excellent way to organize them according to political factions, familial relationships, nationalities, races, and so on. Got a lot of story ideas all set in a single universe? A mind map will help you sort your ideas visually, ensure you’ve recorded each one, and then review the interdependencies among them.
A caveat: While mind maps work really well for planning writing projects of all sizes and complexities, I haven’t found them to be the best tool for plotting. I prefer to take a more linear approach to plotting so I go for an outline format most of the time. You absolutely can use a mind map for plotting, but in my experience they’re better suited to other planning tasks.
Applying mind mapping to nonfiction writing is even more rewarding, as with nonfiction you’ll have a sense of the structure you need to follow based on the type of writing you’re doing. Business books, textbooks, cookbooks, even high school and college writing assignments all come with strict guidelines on what and how much to write.
You can’t, for instance, just sit down with an encyclopedic knowledge about a subject and write a textbook on it following your train of thought. You need to tackle the necessary topics in a logical way, considering knowledge dependencies, so later sections build on knowledge acquired in earlier sections—for instance. So your mind map may begin with the central bubble “calculus textbook” and from there you will begin to branch out to calculus topics like “derivatives,” “integrals,” “functions.” And from your “functions” bubble, you’ll probably want to branch out to the different classes of functions—“linear,” “algebraic,” “trigonometric.” Or, whatever. Math is outside my wheelhouse.
But you might also have a bubble called “ancillaries” with more sub-bubbles like “summaries,” “glossaries,” “exercises,” “quizzes”—to keep track of the many different elements each chapter will have to have. Perhaps another top-level bubble would cover “appendixes”—the collections of reference material your textbook will need to have in its end matter. My point is your bubbles don’t have to be strictly congruent. Half your bubbles might be about content topics and half your bubbles might be about other topics surrounding your project. You don’t have to make multiple mind maps.
Postscript to the above: Do not write a calculus textbook. Trust me on this. Don’t make me draw you a mind map of the many reasons not to embark upon this doomed endeavor.
Let’s take this on faith: I have sold you. You’re on the mind mapping bandwagon and you want to give it a try. I’m Robert Preston and you, Shelf Life reader, are River City, Iowa, and mind mapping is a patently absurd number of trombones.
You can do mind mapping on paper or you can do it digitally. If you’re interested in doing it on paper, you won’t need additional guidance from me (probably). All you need is a piece of paper and a pencil or pen. Those among you with artistic inclinations can probably make some really cool and beautiful mind maps. I draw analogue, pen-on-paper mind maps from time to time in my bullet journal.
The drawbacks to working with paper and pen include physical limitations of the size of your paper; inability to move pieces around to reorganize them; and difficulty adding to your mind map in the middle of the night without turning on the lights, which is a big one for me.
If I’m going to sit down and spend some time on a mind map as part of a brainstorming session, then, paper is great. It works out fine if I will start and finish the map in one session. But if my mind map is a living document, one I will add to over time as new thoughts and ideas arise, then paper loses its appeal. And most of my mind maps grow and evolve. For those, a digital solution is better.
When it comes to spending money, let it be known—I don’t have a problem spending money. I mean—sorry—I did not characterize the situation well. I absolutely have a problem with spending money but the problem is not not spending money, the problem is spending money altogether too freely. I am always buying all kinds of garbage I don’t need. When I sat down to really consider the pros and cons of various mind mapping software, I first asked myself how much money I would be willing to pay—either as an ongoing subscription or as a lump sum—for this type of tool. Having the answer to the preceding question would quickly whittle down the list of software I’d need to review. So how much would I, well-documented longtime profligate spender, be willing to spend on mind mapping software.
The answer was none. Zero dollars and zero cents. I don’t object to purchasing or subscribing to software at all. I have several paid software subscriptions and some of them are for more frivolous purposes than this. I never pirate software. I am happy to pay for the products I use. I realized, though, I wasn’t willing to pay for software to do something I can so easily do by hand, use so infrequently, and could jury rig an existing free program to do in a pinch. So, armed with this knowledge—I am interested in the convenience of a digital mind mapping software but not interested enough to pay cash money for it—I narrowed my consideration down to free products only.
Well, mostly.
I will make an exception for Scapple. Scapple is from Literature & Latte—the Scrivener people. I am not a fan of Scrivener. I’ve used it, I don’t enjoy using it, and on principle I don’t want to deal with uncommon proprietary file types—ever. I don’t like Scrivener because you can only open Scrivener projects with Scrivener and I have had to re-download the free trial after I lost track of my old Scrivener account to extract old work files into a PDF format so I could see them again. Ick.
Lots of folks like Scrivener and use it, though, so Scapple is worth mentioning for its ability to interface with the popular writing suite. You can drag notes over from Scapple right into its sister software, so if Scrivener is your writing tool of choice and you’re open to throwing a little more money at Literature & Latte, this may be your best bet. It has similar mapping features to other available mind mapping programs and the interface will be familiar to Scrivener users. While Scapple has a free trial version, the trial expires after thirty days and the software stops working until you purchase a license.
Scapple lacks the feature I consider most important: Cross-platform access to my working files. Scapple is only available for MacOS and Windows and doesn’t back up to a cloud, so I can’t use it on my phone or tablet. I want to be able to work on my phone (middle of the night), tablet (when I’m not near my computer), and my Windows PC. And I want access to the same files—I don’t want to have to email the file back and forth to myself when I switch platforms.
The first software I encountered to meet both my requirements—cross-platform access to cloud-based files and a free trial version—was XMind. XMind’s trial version is perpetual but does not have all the features available in the pro version. This is a totally fine compromise for me, because I may continue to use the software and if I agree with the value proposition of the pro features, I can opt to purchase later. I won’t get locked out of my files after thirty days. XMind can be used on mobile (Android and Apple), desktop (Windows and MacOS), and also has a web version for use on any platform.
However—oof. A big limitation for me is XMind doesn’t sync maps across your account. I downloaded the desktop software, signed into my account, and created a map. I loaded up the web-browser version, signed in, and created a map. Neither map appeared in the “my maps” section of my account, and neither map was available in the other platform—the map I created on my desktop wasn’t available in the web browser, and the one I made in the web browser wasn’t available in the desktop app. Womp, womp. Seventy-six sad trombones.
The last software I checked out was Coggle. Coggle is fully web-based, with no desktop or mobile application. You can use it in a web browser on any device, it just doesn’t have specific apps. After creating a free account, you’ll be able to make up to three free private maps (and unlimited public maps, although I could not figure out how to make a public map nor unlock a private one). Upgrading to a paid plan gives you unlimited private maps and additional quality-of-life features. Private maps are stored in the cloud so they’re accessible to you wherever you sign in to Coggle, more than making up for the lack of apps for me.
Coggle has great features and is also the prettiest and most intuitive to use, supports annotation of your map, looping and joining branches, and real-time online collaboration with other users. You can export your maps as PDF, you can link to your Google Drive account. At the end of the day, this one was the clear winner for me. I’m definitely adding this tool to my arsenal for mind mapping in the future so I can stop forcing Microsoft One Note to fill a role it isn’t good at. If you’re interested in trying out digital mind mapping—and you’re not already invested in the Literature & Latte product suite—give Coggle a try.
I hope you enjoyed today’s article on mind mapping and its thoughtfully considered software recommendations and its dearth of my favorite four-letter word. Today’s article was brought to you by your fellow reader Bill. Have a wonderful weekend and I’ll see you next Tuesday.
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