Story Mapping Quotes

I definitely want to write some fiction, for sure. I already have half of the next book. I already have it all mapped out. I'm ready. I'm ready to bring it to the world.

Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.

I used my daughter's crayons for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle.

If you're going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you'll never make a map of it afterwards.

We mapped out the whole movie, and then worked backwards from that to do these shows. It might not be a movie. It might be something else.

I have things planned for every character like what they're doing down the road and coming to different realizations but I don't have how they overlap.

I jump around in the plotting stage, where I basically just make a bulleted list of every damn thing that happens in the entire book.

I try to outline. I'm a lazy outliner. I will put the points down of each chapter or series of chapters, but it always changes. For me it's a place of evolution. I don't really know who the characters are. I don't really know what the story is. I outline and that really just gets me moving. It's like I'm drawing up fake maps, but they turn out to be correct.

While writing 'Cold Mountain,' I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. He's much the same Jack who climbs the beanstalk, vulnerable and clever and opportunistic.

The great thing about working in cable is that, since the season is truncated - we only do 12 shows - the writers are more at ease in terms of mapping out the trajectory of the story and the characters.

I'm a plotter. A thinker, a note-maker, a mapper and a flow-charter. I'm up for using any device that will teach me more about the people I'm writing about and their story.

With each book, in each place, I have to keep an ongoing map as I write because otherwise I don't know where I am.

I don't believe that the world is that crazy that they have nothing to better to do with their time than send me emails and tell me these outlandish stories. So I've started to plot the communities that have come to me on a map.

After we map out all the main characters' individual arcs, using color-coded index cards, we arrange them by episode and get a rough idea of the scene order.