Thursday, January 28, 2010

Bubbl.Us

Are you a web person? Not the internet kind. The story kind.

If you are, you know how helpful story webs can be in brainstorming and plotting. You also know how hard it can be to fit all your ideas on one sheet of paper, or to go back to it later and read what you originally wrote. And what happens when you start to organize your ideas, selecting those that work for you and discarding the rest until - you change your mind? Story web ideas aren’t easy to shift around, not without a lot of rewriting.

That’s where bubbl.us comes in. It’s not new and amazing. It’s simply a story web on the web. But the advantage of having it here is that it’s always neat and legible. You can make it as huge as you want without running out of space, and changing your mind, or rearranging things is no hassle at all.

The arrangement of things is actually the fun part (for me.) After you decide on the ideas that work for your story, you can rearrange the plot elements you want to use in a linear fashion to see if they’ll work. Not happy with it? Just erase, or rearrange - whatever suits your purpose. You can also change the colors of your ‘bubbles,’ so that different threads in your story are different colors, making ideas easier to follow.

In the end, you not only have a plot for your story, you have a plot line with major plot points and connecting scenes you can save, print, embed, e-mail and/or even change again if you feel like it. It's free, and you don't even have to register if you don't want to save what you've created.

Check it out!

1 comment:

Mur said...

Very cool! You and Diane are officially the queens of finding cool stuff on the web.