In a bid to get ideas for my new novel into some sort of shape I am trying A1 flip chart paper - big felt tips, colour coding, loads of space etc. I'm even thinking of putting the pad on an easel and standing at it like a painter. This is a change from the little notebooks I've been using and so far it seems to be working. Does anyone else find that size matters in this way?

Naomi R

Defo. It's very liberating to be freed from the confines of standard A4, I think. More space = bigger ideas, more possibilities. After all, white space should be inspiring, not scary. I appropriated the dining room table recently to plot out a novel, and it was really fun - I found it helped to be able to quite literally move ideas around and reshuffle turning points, character development, etc.

MF, did you literally move things round? Were you using cards/pieces of paper?

A combination. I ended up having to resort to tape and blue-tac, as the cat seems to enjoy sitting on paper (??)

I could only take that tactic so far, however - it was great in terms of planning the outline, getting a sense of how the characters would balance/relate to each other...but eventually I had to refocus and reduce everything to a couple of simple plans on paper. It was a very useful process in the early stages, though!

I can't work on smaller than A4, and my big plan for the novel is three of those, landscape-wise and stuck together. But I haven't tried anything bigger. I'd like to try the colour coding thing, and I can imagine that having that much space would encourage you to be quite bold about arrangements.

Emma

That sounds like a great idea - I would love to try it.
I have very bad, large, messy handwriting so I need really to write on A4 minimum size anyway.

I don't write novels but I work on long term projects.

Bulletin boards are good for posting index cards (often oversized ones).

Naomi, something like your A1 flip chart paper, I use a board that clips pages on the top (vertically), so pages can flip after I tab them on the sides.

Do you mean a board that stands up or one that lies flat on the table?

The board is like a clip board but not with a clip. It's handheld and large enough to sit across the lap or put on a table. The advantage with pages attached at the top (after hole punched) is flipping back and forth with ease. The paper size still is A4 but there's depth for indexing and flexibility for movement.

I look forward to hear what works for you with this project!

I have an enormous white board at home and map out all sorts of things - I like how easily things can be moved, erased and expanded.

Definitely a good one for big thinking and absolute clarity!