Moira and the Mind Map

 If you follow me on Mastodon or Twitter, you may have seen me talk about “mind mapping” rather than outlining for the Moira serial. What the hell is that? Glad you asked!

No plot, no problem

You may remember I started the Moira stories under the whimsical name “Grumpy Bunny”; I didn’t have a plot in mind. Honestly, I had deliberate lack of plot in mind. After Red Savina, I tried to go back to another Mensura college romance like Saida & Autumn, but Kani’s story never took flight for me. So instead, I tried another silly vignette series like the Mouse Vignettes, except instead of having an ever-growing mouse woman, it would have a bunny woman who reacted to relatively minor annoyances with wildly disproportionate force. This conceit is pretty strong in the first three entries, “Two Wolves,” “15 Items or Less,” and “Parking Permit.” If I got four or five goofy, subliminally sexy scenes out of the idea? Job well done. On to something real.

But in that first story, the unnamed rabbit woman says she’s retired from being a goddess. Between you and me, I just thought it would be funny if after she did horrible things, people fell to their knees in worship and it just made her even more exasperated.

In the second story, she casually uplifts a sheep woman in the checkout line with her to godhood after the sheep instantly (and arguably terrifyingly) takes to being a relative giantess. I was still firmly set against a Grand Outline, perhaps because Red Savina was the most tightly outlined thing I’ve ever written in my life. Yet there were… things here to explore. Maybe this all connected into… something.

Exploring free-form ideas to find connections? That sounds like mind map time!

Break out the yarn and index cards

Wikipedia’s mind map article describes a mind map as “a diagram used to visually organize information”:

It is often created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept, and other ideas branch out from those major ideas.

I bought a mind map program a while ago because it sounded neat, but it never clicked with me. Well, if it was ever gonna click, it was gonna click with the grumpy bunny. So: create a new map with a single bubble in the middle just labeled “Moira,” and start drawing things out from that.

I’d already had the idea that she was the goddess of something, and several mythologies have goddesses who have the dual roles of love and war. So add those as connected bubbles, along with “retired.” How do you retire from being divine? Clearly, she hasn’t lost her powers. Maybe she’d been, you know, asked to “retire.” So another bubble: “exiled.” Maybe she’d lost a power struggle.

And in those first two stories she’d been nicer to herbivores and meaner to carnivores. Why? In part because it’s funnier, and in part because role reversal has always been one of my buttons. (The cat giantess swallowing the rabbit woman is cool; the rabbit giantess swallowing the cat woman is hot. Just ask Saida.) Put those down, too. And a bubble that’s at least a placeholder for the other gods, as well as one for Diana. And Hazel. Is Moira creating a new pantheon? Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t, maybe she is and doesn’t know it yet. Still, worth a bubble!

So soon, you get something like this:

No, wait. Ahem. You get something like this:

Then you sort of stare at things for a while. Add some more bubbles. Draw some more lines. Just why did Moira rebel? Moira must have been laying relatively low, too. But starting an impromptu bacchanalia that makes carnivores half-sized toys and police into party favors isn’t exactly a subtle, hard to miss display of force. Neither is creating new goddesses. Who’s noticing? If this world is a little bit more along the corporate dystopia path, who’s benefiting?

By the time the fourth episode, “Checkpoint,” came out, I knew about Celestial Capital and had ideas, if all still pretty squiggly, for a lot more. (I didn’t know Rhiannon’s name, species, or that she was Hazel’s nonplussed roommate, but I already had a placeholder bubble for her.) I ended up creating a second main node just called “The Gods” that led to the old ones, the new ones, and Moira’s new crew. And, after episode 7, “Natural Order,” I created a third main node, shifted things around, drew more connecting lines. What’s the new node labeled?

“Order vs. Chaos.”

There were a lot of themes already on the board—and by now in the text—but Hazel gave the series its mission statement:

Hazel sits up and cracks her knuckles. “I think we introduce the natural order to some long overdue chaos.”

Ask your muse if mind mapping is right for you

I suspect my crazy mind map for Moira’s story is approaching the limit of its usefulness; despite my best efforts, this has become a genuine serial with an actual plot and endpoint and stuff. While I want to let the characters guide me—and make no mistake, they have been, and I’m pretty sure Rhiannon is just as iron-willed as the other three—I’m going to have to sit down and come up with a basic outline for story beats and plot turns. And, I’ll need to think on character arcs for not only Moira but our other three heroines, which kind of takes this from one of my fluffiest stories to one of my most complicated ones. (I should also go back and edit the first few episodes to better reflect the story as it’s developed. I’m not going to rush on that one, but if/when I get there, I’ll let you all know.)

So. I’m not going to say this is a great tool for everyone, but it’s a tool worth trying. My impression long ago was that a mind map was an outline for people who hate outlining, but it’s not. It’s something different. An outline—or the ever-lengthening brainstorming document that I usually use for shorter works instead of a traditional outline—is temporal: it’s a tool for learning where things came from and where they’re going, and it’s great at showing you where your story has missing scenes or story beats. A mind map is spatial: it’s a tool for learning how ideas connect, and it’s great at suggesting new ideas and filling in gaps in your holistic model of the story. As a fairly linear thinker, they’re harder for me to wrap my head around, but at least for Moira’s story, it’s been a terrific tool.