Mind Mapping Made Easy

During my latest bout of writer-procrastination, I discovered the ultimate writer-procrastination tool – XMind. It's a tool that can help writers overcome writer's block, offering a new way of visualizing all those ideas bouncing around one's brain and putting them in one, very pretty, visual layout. You can easily move ideas from one place to another, add notes, create links to websites and documents. It's brilliant and free unless you opt for the Pro version which is $49 and offers the ability to export into Word, resulting in an almost-complete outline of your work.I found this excellent video on The Mind Mapping Software Blog that shows how this powerful tool can be a boon for writers.I stared using XMind to map out my new book, helping me come up with a structure, which I was struggling with. For demonstration purposes, I created a map for the first section of The Alchemy of Loss as a way of visualizing the structure that I inadvertently created when I wrote the book (how did I ever do that without XMind???). This is what I came up with: There is nothing like procrastinating so prettily! Banish writer's block!!

Alchemy of Loss Section 1