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

[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.