Sib Law's poetry, photography, and other musings

I’m a fairly visual person. What does that mean for me writing long-fiction? For one, it means keeping flip-chart and markers stocked up on the door to my office. It also means a lot of bubble maps. Every chapter gets its own bubble map. The entire arc of the plot gets a bubble map. Then, as I lay out all the pieces of the puzzle, sometimes I need a map to see how they all stick together. Yesterday, somewhere over the midwest at 30,000 feet, I did just that with all the data-points for my forthcoming novel set in Stratford, CT. Most of my chapter bubble-maps follow the plot: beginning-middle-end. This was more of a seeing how each data point relates to all the other data points; not so much plot as connection. Here’s a quick window into what that looks like:

What does your creative process look like?