Where do you brainstorm?  How do you brainstorm? Are you a visual brainstormer or are you an audible brainstormer?

I ask these questions because the time has come for me to do some serious brainstorming.  I’ll be wrapping up Biloxi Sunrise in the next 30 days or so, and then it will be time to start on something new.   I like to try to keep two projects going at a time, and I have all of these amazing little snippets of ideas that I need to turn into a full blown story.  The hardest part is fleshing out the details.

I found with Biloxi Sunrise that a visual method worked best for me.  I’m not a charts and graphs kind of girl, so plotting aides like the Snowflake Method don’t really really help me.  But an array of colorful 3 X 5 cards and a foam board did wonders.  I could put everything up on the board (called a storyboard) and see where I had huge holes.  Then filling in those holes was a matter of going back and writing down what was missing.

(As an aside, I tend to be far more creative when I’m writing long-hand. It’s slower, so I guess my brain can keep up with my hands.  When I’m typing, there are times when my fingers get ahead of my brain.  And then there’s the whole error issue.  When I’m typing and make an error, I feel the need to go back and fix it and that interrupts the flow. But, back to the original topic…)

I’ve even tried adding music to the mix.  It doesn’t work for me.  I write best in quiet.  And not the quiet that you get when everyone else in the household is up moving around, but they leave you alone.  I’m talking that amazing quiet while everyone is still sleeping, the house is at rest, and there is no electronic buzz that come with televisions, radios, etc. I wish I could write through the noise…and I guess I can. It’s just not going to be great writing.  I already know that.

So, it’s storyboarding for me in the very near future, but I would love to hear what you do that works.