A Story As A Map

I’m a pretty big fan boy of Wil Wheaton (although I still hate Wesley Crusher – SHUT UP Wesley!) I’ve never had a situation when the Venn diagram of my fan boy nerdness (it’s a pretty big chart) has overlapping circles in both ‘geo’ and ‘Wil Wheaton’… until today. In his blog, WWdN In Exile, Mr. Wheaton has a pretty neat post about how he mentally thinks of a story. Rather than try to describe the relevant bit, I’ll just quote it here (and hopefully not violate Wheaton’s Law in doing so):

When I write fiction, the first thing I do is break the story into acts, then into important things within those acts, and then into a few key scenes. Think of it like a map, with some pins pushed into it showing a route from beginning to end. It’s a zoomable map, so some of the pins are closer together on a well-defined path, while others are more general.

The whole thing struck me as rather Google Maps-esque way of thinking about story telling. It’s actually inspired me to pick up the pen a bit more in the future because it gives me a very accessible way to think about story telling. It seems like it’s a mental model that has applications even for those working on non-fiction, so I thought I’d pass it along!