Welcome to our Monday Coffee. Every Monday is set aside for musings and considerations around the Twinverse, the Tales, and the writing craft as a whole. We will occasionally discuss sources of inspiration for the Twinverse, share some text from existing or upcoming books, discuss the history of the Twinverse's development, and how roleplaying games have contributed to fleshing out the world. We may even look at some of the original documentation on the Twinverse, at its very beginning. Happy Monday!
Our Monday coffee is slightly delayed this week as we continue to work on the next step of the North Star release plan, with a paperback out on September 1st. However, today I would like to touch upon another invaluable tool that has helped me organize the lore of the Twin Worlds, define relationships within specific boundaries, and envision some of the interactions between characters in the Tales of the Twin Worlds: mind maps.
Mind maps are an underutilized tool for worldbuilding and novel planning, but they can be massively useful and pack enormous amounts of information in an intuitive way that makes it easy to follow. At their heart, mind maps mimic the way our brain catalogues information. Starting from a central concept, topics branch out with individual relationships to the central topic and to each other mapped out. You can also add subtopics, which can help clarify or highlight some important aspects of the topic they are attached to.
For example, the picture above is a simple mindmap beginning to describe the hamlet of Runegate, in Malgaria. It's just a start, and nowhere near as complex as it will become, but I chose Runegate as the main topic, and all topics connected to it are characters in that village. The arrows connect the topics to the main topic (should I have characters that are important to the village, but do not live there, they will not be connected to the topic "Runegate" with an arrow). There are notes for each character briefly describing who they are (a priest, a craftsman, etc.). I can change the color of the topics and the color of their borders if I wanted to, and associate those colors to different meanings (e.g. a dead character or a living one). I can create relationships between characters, represented by the arrows, and label them (or change the arrow style to indicate different relationships).
In this manner, I can gradually build up the community of Runegate, map out their connections to each other (enmities, family ties, friendships, loves, etc.), even group characters by family if I wish to. And as a visual aid, a mind map is far more helpful to track down these connections than a simple Word document or even a Wiki page could ever be.
Mind maps can be used for anything and everything: while I prefer to use them for location mapping, you can use them to map organizations, countries (you could have each primary topic representing a province, and each secondary topic representing a town or location), pantheons, stories (each topic could be a chapter), and so on. There are many tools online that make it easy to build a mind map and have a very flat learning curve. My favorite has always been XMind, but a simple Google search for "mind mapping software" will give you a good look at the various possibilities. It's important to use a tool you find intuitive, as this makes it much easier to input data, and to retrieve it as well.
I hope this brief article has given you some ideas about the use of mind maps in worldbuilding and novel planning. If you already use mind maps, do you find them useful? And if you have never used them before, are excited to give them a try? Let me know, and thank you for joining me on this Monday Coffee!
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