Think With Your Fingers

When you have an idea for a book, but you don’t have an outline or any prose written yet, write that idea down.

You have limited bandwidth, a finite amount of RAM. You can’t build the entire story in your head. If a good idea pops into your head, write it down. Not only does this clear up space for more ideas, you can expand on it while putting it on paper (or whatever medium).

For this stage of story building, I’ve used a single document within Obsidian for iPad. I will write a paragraph or a sentence around any ideas within that file. I’ll separate the ideas with empty lines. When the document starts getting cumbersome, I’ll start expanding the document into different wiki pages and connect them via links (Obsidian is really good for that).

For me, when I feel I’ve fleshed out the world enough to know I’m on to something, I start outlining the story itself (see Outlines are my Friend). This brainstorming document can be a great resource for later, and can continue to grow as time moves on.