abuse of index cards

[egypturnash]

Clever analog way to help categorize index cards. The particular use is for story plotting, and I wish I'd run across this idea before I filled about 140 or so index cards up with Drowning City fragments. You could probably use it for any data that works well as little bits on a bunch of cards; I distinctly recall a scene in an otherwise-forgotten young adult mystery novel where the detective used this technique to narrow a list of suspects down to one avenue of investigation.

Drowning City? Still percolating; I've been work-hectic this month. I've got the beginnings of some page layouts, but I need to get ahold of some good architecture reference. last night I talked with my mom and she suggested this book; I'll probably order a copy as soon as I have cashflow. The story's not exactly set in New Orleans - but it's set in a warped memory of that city, and I want to have ample source material to work from.

Comments

[jenkatb4u.livejournal.com]

I.. mostly like thinking of scenes to set to music. Most of them involve falling scenes or high-speed.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

The problem is figuring out how to link them into something bigger!

[jenkatb4u.livejournal.com]

Something complex and worldly, yes. But something on the scale of a kids' cartoon series.. That'd be a breeze. :>

[orb2069.livejournal.com]

Could you just take the stack (with a generous helping of blanks) into Kinkos on a slow tuesday mid-morning and ask them to drill an edge for spiral binding? I'd scotch tape them into a brick to avoid accidents and mark the brick to avoid miscommunication, but other than that, you should be OK.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I can't really put holes in my existing notes, you see, 'cause I wrote out ot the edges. I'd have holes in my words!

[orb2069.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised you didn't know about this - Heck, I remember this sort of thing being in the Whole Earth Catalog back in the '80s - Heck, I even pointed somebody to the idea a while back (http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/35165#548274).

I thought the whole point of putting ideas on notecards was the enforced granularization of the material: Dosen't cramming them border-to-border kind of defeat that?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Like I said, I'd run into it in something I'd read when I was, oh, six or so, but I didn't remember the basic idea, or think of it in the context of 'organizing writing' when I started dumping Drowning City onto a pile of index cards.

I have it reasonably organized, and have few enough right now that I can organize them by hand. *shrug* Next project.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

And... some cards have a word or two; some have a question. Some have a question and an answer. Some have 3-6 bullet points on them, listing the major events that happen in a chapter. Some have script fragments; larger-sized cards even have page thumbnails. Some of this stuff has margins, but enough of it doesn't...

[wolflahti.livejournal.com]

That's a ealy nifty way to access and organize the data on the cards, but I'm obviously missing something fundamental. Once you have all the hero cards or heroine cards or hero/heroine cards, what do you *do* with them?

[zeeth_kyrah]

Simple: lay them out and visualize the character. Then write something coherent about that person.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Think about them.

"Hey, I refer to this event several times, but I don't think I've defined it. *scribble*"
"Hmmm, I think I see a theme in the way this thing and this other thing correspond. Shall I make it explicit?"
"I know I wrote about the hero's relationship to the prophecy, but I need the details. *quickly find three cards in 300*"

Putting all the stuff on index cards is a way to get it out of your head so you can stop thinking about the details and see it from a higher level without worrying about forgetting stuff. And this is a way to quickly find a particular card, or set of cards, in the stack...

Of course, just dealing a random hand of cards from the deck and free-associating about their relationships can be valuable, too. I found a whole subtheme by just noticing some correspondences in what was on top of the big sprawl of cards when I initially wrote a bunch of it down.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

This index card trick is cute... but unfortunately it goes against the way I write, which is to just write whatever comes into my head, with perhaps a vague idea of what I want to happen and how I want it to come out. All my freeform stuff seems to be the better stuff that I've written, while work which has prerequisites tends to be stiff and unappealing and is also more difficult to write. It's difficult to get interested in, too. When it's all new to me, it's more fun.

I try to keep basic ideas in my head; if they're compelling enough, I feel, they'll stick. If I think it's too fragmentary or elaborate to remember, I'll actually write the piece of text which contains it, and set that aside for later inclusion with the work; sometimes they need to be edited in light of what I subsequently write, but there's a finished piece of text there rather than an idea, and it's fresh from the moment I thought of it. But basic points have a tendency to remind me of themselves.