How to Find a Fresh Angle for Your Writing

Dan Ochiva writes for a select group of top feature film editors. He also runs a popular website, NYCPP: NYC Production and Post News, about film and video production and post-production technology, facility openings and people making film and video industry news in the New York City area.

To stay current with local events—and to stay ahead of industry trends, Ochiva says he searches just about everywhere for news and information. He uses ConceptDraw MINDMAP as a single interface to capture all of these disparate information types.

Hobie: How do you get started on a new article?
Ochiva: Before I start writing, I’ll do a combination of interviews and research. I might visit user forums to see what new issues are on people’s minds, and what’s happening in research and development. I check out industry groups that might be holding meetings or giving talks about future trends. As I go through all this stuff, I'll put it all into a mind map. With so many mixed types of information to deal with, mapping helps me pull it all together and make sense of it.

Hobie: How did you first find out about mind mapping?
Ochiva: I started out just trying to find a better way to manage information. That led me to reading about mind mapping. At first, I did my own version of it. I’d buy these big sketch books—two or three feet on a side—and tape sheets to the wall, and hand draw the maps. I worked that way for a few years, and it helped. But then mind mapping software came along.

Hobie: You wrote an article about storage and networking in film and video post-production. But you were telling me that since these are such big topics, you wanted to find a way to focus what you wrote to help readers get their brains around something so complex. How did mind mapping help you do that?
Ochiva: There’s a certain kind of insight that comes from using mind mapping. I think that's due to a combination of seeing relationships between things and from being able to see everything on one screen. In planning the storage and networking article, I could see at a glance that a lot of people were thinking and writing about how hard it was to get the technology to work with the rest of the editing suite. So that helped me see a trend that I could address in my article. Being able to spot a trend early on is a great skill for a journalist to have, and mind maps really help you see the connections that are leading to trends.

Hobie: So how do you go from mapping to writing?
Ochiva: I use ConceptDraw's built-in numbering capability to organize the different nodes of the map into something that’s more or less what I think the final article will develop into. Then I just export it out as an RTF file, and just go from there. And I find that this saves me time and frustration since I don’t have to go through so many iterations to get to the final structure.

Hobie: Do you see yourself continuing to use mapping?
Ochiva: Oh, yeah. There've been some major changes in the industry over the years. So there’s a lot of information to keep in your head, juggle, and pull together to make sense of new developments. Mind mapping is by far the best way I've found to keep information fresh and viable because I can organize all this information in a way that makes sense to me. Instead of having to review a big file I've created, I can just scan the map. And it's easy to drop new information and ideas into the map as they occur. At the same time, I can visually navigate to go deeper into any one section of the map if I want more detail.

Hobie: Do you think mapping is particularly well-suited to writers?
Ochiva: I think that mind mapping helps you bring form to the information you’ve gathered and the ideas that've come from it. Knowing that you can add structure to information and ideas, and that that structure will make sense to you in the future, that’s a great benefit to me as a writer—and a great relief.

Learn more about how the ConceptDraw product suite can focus and accelerate your thinking.

How to Write Like a Consultant

Have you ever had a writing assignment that required you to write in a new language? I don't mean a foreign language--just a new one.

I recently began preparing to ghostwrite for a consulting firm. I'd glanced over such articles in the past. But this time I needed to take a deep dive. I was surprised to learn how different it was from everyday English. So the first step I needed to take was to become familiar with the words, phrases, and syntax used in this fairly arcane world.

I began by reading through a number of articles already published by the firm. As I read, I used a ConceptDraw mindmap to begin to capture and categorize the language:

I noticed right away that the verbs used by the consultants were different from the ones I normally use. So I just started typing them into the map, along with accompanying words to help me understand the context in which the words were used:

I did the same with the other major parts of speech, such as adjectives:

I also started a branch in the map to capture some of the tendencies in the writing. Part of the magic of writing like a consultant, it seems, it creating long, meandering sentences--and using passive verbs.

Like all professionals, consultants also use a smattering of "terms of art" and acronyms for which I had to find definitions. I'm keeping them in the map as well:

And as I read an article, I add it to the "Articles Reviewed" so I know which articles I've already parsed for the map.

There is much more to learning to "write like a consultant." But having a concise way to capture and organize this niche language is a good first step.

Writers/Bloggers: Brainstorm Blog Topics Fast

Michelle Rafter has posted a new article of mine on her WordCount blog. The article is called "4 steps to using mind mapping for story ideas."

3 Keys to Writing 4 Articles About 5 Ways to Succeed

I have spent time lately browsing around to see what kind of business writing tips are available on the web. Pretty flat landscape... IMHO. Blogs are full of clever little articles that follow the hackneyed format of providing X number of tips, tricks, and trivia (8 Ways to Build Your Blog Traffic, 10 Things That Make Great Headlines, 15 Ways to Make Your Team More Team-Like, 297 Ways to Run a Better Meeting).

I've read the studies that say this format generates more traffic. But in my experience after you read five or ten of these, you've pretty much had your fill. I mean, can everything really be reduced to a handful of crisp bullet points?

I was talking to a friend who tweets. I was telling her that it seems like 90% of the tweets I get are much the same--nothing more than armchair philosophizing: "To serve the meal of success one must first taste failure"; "It is only by talking that we truly communicate" and so on... You could sit around all day and make these things up. But she said the sends out a lot of that stuff because people love it. I don't get it.

I'm not saying that blogs or tweets needs to be masterworks of literature. I just think it would be refeshing if people blogged about things they cared about, rather than trying to come up quick and easy ways to "fill a page." It just seems like so many people have blogs because... because they want to be bloggers, I guess.

I'm a writer, and I think it is great when people are moved to put words down on the page. I just think it would be better for all if there was some connection, some emotion in what is being written. Otherwise, we reduce or our common body of thought to a vortex of numbered lists about numbered lists.