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.

[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.

[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?

[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.