Mind-Mapping?

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I was tooling around this morning trying to find some tools for developing plotlines and narratives, and I found this neat-o software called Freemind that allows you to develop huge, branching charts around a central concept. Apparently, in some circles, this kind of creative brainstorming activity is all the vogue. Well, maybe not, but "mind-mapping" seems to be used by quite a few people.

A notebook example (not mine):

Anyone here use this sort of thing or find it useful? For me, it's like a gold strike. It allows me to go off on tangents and mine the details of thought and imagination, yet everything stays somewhat focused, orbiting around a center concept or node. The software is nice because you don't have the constraints of a page--although this presents a problem of its own when you try to print! Tiny, tiny words, big mess.

Just wanted to share.

 

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It's becoming all the rage in my company. The marketing people are all goo-goo over it.

I have notebooks and scraps of paper and napkins with this sort of thing and my other favorite, elaborate flowcharts that detail patterns. This sort of thing is nice for interrelationships without cause/effect patterns, but I tend to have stuff that looks more like this with tons of arrows everywhere.

I don't think I'm that interested in the SW, though. I'm more of a pen and paper kind of gal. As for limits of paper... nothing bigger paper won't cure. For my undergraduate thesis I had a roughly 2' x 3' page I sketched out the patterns in the data on before compiling into words, since I'm primarily visual. All you need is a roll of butcher paper!