White boarding a story

A short story requires a lot of information to be at the writer’s fingertips. A novel on the other hand requires a vast amount of information. Accessing this information can present a formidable problem for an author. In short, it has to be organized in a way that allows the author to retrieve it without wasting time searching for it. While there are a number of ways to organize this information, my preferred method is to whiteboard all the stuff.

There are many whiteboard apps available and I’ve tried most of them. I’ve settled on two that I prefer to use: Scrintal and Milanote. They use somewhat different approaches but have many similarities. I’ll use Milanote for this article but the same approach would apply if I used Scrintal

Milanote has a free version if you want to try it out. So does Scrintal.

In the screenshot below, I show the main board and all the sub-boards associated with the story. The screenshot is an example of the great flexibility that whiteboards provide. Each of the sub-boards can be easily customized to satisfy the user’s preferences.

Each sub-board is dedicated to a specific area of information. This make it easy to retrieve information: just click on an icon and the sub-board will open up to display the contents. The screenshot below is an example of the type of information that can be placed in the sub-board. This screenshot displays the plot sub-board.

Besides text information, a user can also upload graphics, PDFs and other content to the whiteboard and sub-boards.
In summary, when creating a long story like a novel or screenplay or memoir or even an non-fiction book, I recommend using a whiteboard to package all the relevant information in an easy-to-use application that provides quick access to that information.
I created a video on how to make a whiteboard for your own story. You can watch it here: