What software/techniques do people use to gather ideas?
I'm planning to create a game. It won't be the first game I've created (or even released), but it will be my first game with any story to speak of.
I'm still very much in the planning phase of the entire thing (even earlier than that perhaps), and I often have thoughts of events that could happen, or pivotal characters that could exist, but I don't know of a good way to track them.
I know that I've already had (and subsequently forgotten) quite a few ideas.
I think the fact that it's going to be a game is irrelevant to the question really. I'm quite sure that my problem applies to any kind of story writing.
- I could probably write things down - but I fear that doing so would not scale well. I might keep jotting down paragraphs here and there - but once I've done so I may never find it again once there are a few.
- Ideas containing events may not necessarily have a character assigned to them yet. How do people even write down ideas when you aren't willing to commit to the names of characters yet? "Person A meets Person B" is confusing to write and read.
What software or techniques do people use to keep track of their fragmented ideas so that they can be found later, and drawn together as they evolve?
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2 answers
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Use a wiki
Many people are using a wiki when they are creating their worlds, as can be seen by this answer to the question What software is available for keeping and organising notes about your world? on WorldBuilding.SE.
The biggest one is MediaWiki (the power behind Wikipedia). MediaWiki can be private, and it's not too hard. See this tutorial for information on how to do that. But basically you would create one account and limit it to that. As a bonus MediaWiki is open source and free.
Another option would be DokuWiki on a Stick. This would be a simple home wiki that you could transport around on a USB drive, or possible share over the internet. To see set up look here. And it can still be private. DokuWiki is also open source and free!
There are many other private wiki options but many of them aren't opensource/free.
These are a few easy and free options that you can use to create documents with your ideas and link them to each other. It will be easier to keep track of if you have all your documents in a searchable wiki. And you can link to an existing page whenever you reference it.
For your specific problems:
I could probably write things down - but I fear that doing so would not scale well. I might keep jotting down paragraphs here and there - but once I've done so I may never find it again once there are a few.
It will be easy to find stuff again if it's all in one place with a title. No need to fear that you will have multiple files with each one being somewhere on your computer. Everything will be kept in one place and can be found again if you know what you are searching. You can also simply create a page of "Ideas that are not yet integrated into the story" or something like that and whenever you have a random idea you can link to it there. This will make it easy to keep track of the things that are not yet finished.
Ideas containing events may not necessarily have a character assigned to them yet. How do people even write down ideas when you aren't willing to commit to the names of characters yet? "Person A meets Person B" is confusing to write and read.
The normal way is to use some kind of placeholder. For example whenever you want to have a minor character you simply write down {MinorCharacterWithGrayHair} or something like that. It's best to try of something interesting or somewhat remarkable whenever you introduce a character to make it easy to identify them. You can then create a stub page for them and once you get around to give them a name and some characteristics you can update their main page. Whenever you then come across such a reference you can look at the referenced page and update the name.
If the characters are really just background characters and you feel that the above approach is better to be reserved for you main characters with yet-to-decide names you could of course just use a placeholder without referencing a new page each time. Something like {OldMan} or {LittleChild}.
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Wiki and Flash are all well and good, but here's an answer for lazy people, like me. I use OneNote. It's already on your Windows, and it requires 0 level of tech-savvy. I am a Wikipedia editor, so it's not like that's beyond my technical skills, but when I come to planning my story, I want to do just that - plan my story. No overhead. OneNote gives me just that: it's intuitive, it lets me add images, links, tables and text formatting, layer notes, Ctrl+F on the whole notebook, drag-and-drop ideas. It's not perfect, but it's good enough.
Whatever software you're using, consider this: ideas don't just come when you're sitting by a computer an actively planning. They come when you're commuting and bored, when something draws your attention on the street, etc. A useful way not to lose those ideas is to do your planning on a software that lets you access your file from multiple platforms, including your phone.
@Secespitus gives an excellent answer regarding placeholder names, so let me just stress one element: don't just call your old man OldMan: call him {OldMan} (or some other markup). The difference is that once you have several dozen names for places and characters, some of them still placeholders, other replaced with what you're actually going to use, you can search for the { to find what you still need to find names for.
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