Hop on Author Twitter for a few minutes and you’ll be flooded with mood boards and aesthetic photo collages. Big work-in-progress threads and NaNo progress tracking threads capped with nine-square grids of photos are ubiquitous, and for good reason. Mood boards are one of the best tools at our disposal for communicating an entire character or novel in a single glance. But even though my feed is overflowing with them, we’ve yet to harness their full potential.
We’re not thinking big enough. What if mood boards weren’t just shorthand summaries of our plots? What if we used them to plot a novel itself?
Mood boards were invented to generate ideas and inspire creativity, after all. For years, authors have been pinning forests and castles to help them build settings up in their minds, or collecting fashion images to inspire character appearances. This is an extremely effective way to generate images and ideas in the mind’s eye. But we can still push it another step forward, to map out the point for point plot of a novel complete with three story acts and all the fixings. Entirely within a single Pinterest board.
Over the past month, I’ve toiled away and experimented, gathering and arranging pins to plot a novel using only pictures and short quotes. At last I can say, it was a success! So, if you’re more of a visual plotter who loves to use notecard and sticky note scenes and reshuffle the deck until it all lines up, allow me to show you my new favorite way to plot, without using a blot of ink.
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Ground Zero
Throughout this post, I’ll be using an example board I made for Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast, but treating it as if it were a brand new plot so you can follow along with your own original project.
The first step, of course, is to make a board. Mine is public, but if you’re using this to actually plot a novel, be sure you check the box to keep it secret! Even if there aren’t paragraphs to give it all away, you don’t want to risk someone peeking in and working out your story’s plot before it’s published!
Once the board is set up, I’m ready to dive right in and fill it. But since plotting is one of the first steps in storytelling, I don’t have much to go off of. All I have is my base concept, the ‘what if’ that inspired the story. For me, that ‘what if’ is, “What if a selfish prince was cursed to be a monster until he found true love?” For you, it may be, “What if a fae king fell in love with a human actress?” or, “What if people became grim reapers when they died?” No matter how big or small, take your ‘what if’ and use it to build a foundation.
In my case, I set out collecting pictures of castles and witches. While I dig through various search terms tied to those, I pick up on a trend of snow capped towers and dark cloaked women. Steadily, the image building in my mind’s eye is of a dark winter night, a witch traveling through the cold forest until she comes upon a castle, and a cruel prince whose heart is as frozen as the lake outside his stained glass windows. This is world building. I’ve just given myself one of the most important settings in the story: a snowy forest separating the prince’s castle from the village he rules.
This gives me the next search term I’ll use to flesh out my board: ‘winter aesthetic.’ As I'm looking for pins to expand on my setting, I give it time to marinate in my head. Now I've decided winter itself is going to be a recurring theme and force of this story, threatening my protagonists and providing motive to some major story beats. But when I just search for ‘winter,’ I get a hodgepodge of results to wade through, most of which are useless to me. I don’t want winter coats or quotes about Christmas; I want snow covered trees and cracking ice. Pinterest is a blend of informative posts like DIYs, shopping ads, and evocative photos, so I find the best way to narrow it down to the latter is to tack the word ‘aesthetic’ onto anything I’m searching.
More The Merrier
While I’m browsing, I make sure to take more than I think I’ll need. Especially when it comes to scenery pins, like these snowy forest shots I’m collecting, having extra pins will make it easier to add transitions and indicate movement between scenes. I do the same with my stained glass search. And while I’m there, I notice a lot of floral imagery, which gives me an idea for theming the prince’s curse with roses. It sounds silly when the example I’m working with is an already established property, but at this stage you might be noticing a trend of antler imagery and decide your fae king has growing horns like a buck, or see a trend of angels alongside grim reapers and decide your reapers will have wings.
Don’t be afraid of snagging pins to use later, too, even if they fall outside of your current search goals. For example, when I search for winter forests using the aesthetic search term, I come across snowy villages as well. I know I can use these later, so I grab them now, rather than limiting myself to the forests and having to come back for the village when I ‘get to that part.’ I’ll be heavily reordering all these pins later anyway, so it’s more efficient to do things ‘out of order,’ so long as I remember roughly when I pulled them.
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Sum of Their Parts
Working like this, I’m able to build up my settings, but what about the characters? I know my prince will be transformed into a monster, but without a specific actor in mind, how can I portray him on the board?
The key here is to narrow in on specific attributes. I can show the shift from man to beast by pinning a closeup photo of a man’s eye and juxtaposing it with a closeup of an animal’s. I choose wolves since I know there are a lot of those online. Once again, I grab a few of each, knowing I’ll need to signify the prince/Beast several times through the story, as well as his happy ending transformation. Looking at wolves inspires me, too; I grab a bunch of snarling and howling wolves to use as a threat against my main characters later.
I know I want there to be more to the Beast than animal eyes, of course, but I haven’t worked out the details yet. So I look in the opposite direction, and broaden my search to the very vague ‘monster aesthetic’ search term. This is definitely my less preferred method; I get a lot of photos of Monster Energy cans, and a lot of villain quotes that don’t quite fit my character. But I can snag a few quotes like, “You may call me a monster,” and, “I am a beast.” These will serve me well for his inevitable introduction to the heroine. I also find a lot of demon imagery, and while these won’t work as they are, they do inspire me to give him claws, horns, and fangs, which I search for individually. I also grab some swatches of brown fur texture, since fur is visible in the wolf eye photos.
Now I have everything I need for any introduction of the Beast, and any scene that transitions back to the castle after a scene elsewhere. You’ll note – you don’t need images to indicate your character in every single scene. Only when it’s important to clarify who is on screen do you need pins, much like we use dialogue tags only when an indication is needed. If you can remember that the characters in the last scene are in this one too, you don’t have to waste space adding them in.
As for my human characters, I search for ‘brown hair aesthetic’ to find faceless shots I can use for my heroine. This is very handy if you don’t have any particular actress in mind to play a character. Even neck down clothing ads can work if you have a signature outfit in mind, such as Belle’s blue pinafore. Or, you can search for something like ‘red fabric aesthetic,’ and grab a texture in the character's signature color, as I do to indicate Gaston. I grab some shirtless muscle shots for him, too, and when that isn’t enough, I start looking for symbols of a hobby or occupation I can use to indicate his presence. Since I know by this point my heroine will eventually fall in love with the Beast and break his curse, I know this suitor Gaston will act as the main villain of my plot. What better occupation for a beast’s enemy than a hunter? And what better counter to mindless violence than a girl who loves to read and broaden her mind? The searches for hunting knives, animal bones, and books give me plenty to work with for both of them.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
At this point I’ve figured out all my key actors, the inciting incident that changes my hero’s life, the antagonist and conflict of the novel, and a rough idea of the climax. We’re down to the little details now. First, I need something to send my heroine out of her village and into the woods. Maybe she gets lost, or maybe she goes looking for someone else who gets lost. Through a bit of brainstorming, I decide her father stumbles upon the castle and is taken prisoner by the cruel Beast, but his horse returns, prompting Belle to search for him, find him, and trade places with him. So, I add a few more reusable assets to my collection: horses and dungeons. Amidst the horses I find a wolf and a horse fighting – perfect! Now I know why her father got lost, and I can use the wolves I've already collected to keep Belle locked in the castle after she’s taken prisoner.
Act I is all sorted out now. Being locked in the dungeon is a pretty solid door of no return, after all. Next stop on the Hero’s Journey is the tests, allies, and enemies segment. This is interesting – no doubt the tests will be the 'two steps forward one step back' way Belle and the Beast grow closer to one another. But while this is a sort of enemies to lovers story, the real antagonist of the story is Gaston, the suitor. I have to figure out a way to get him to the castle.
I look through what I already have gathered. All the extra village and winter scenes can be used to jump back and forth between Belle and Gaston, so maybe I want to build up Gaston’s plans while Belle and the Beast build up their relationship. That way, once the Beast stops being an enemy, Gaston can step up to fill the role.
Going through the pins I’ve already collected also helps me keep my story tight and feel alive. The more use you can get out of a character or location, the more well rounded they will seem. One of my greatest struggles when writing is continuously introducing new things to the reader. New background characters to describe and then throw out as soon as the scene is done, new locations to discover and then leave. I’m so excited about world building that I turn what should have been a department store into a shopping mall, a village into a country, and it’s too much for a reader to absorb. The annoyance of having to go hunt down more photos for a new setting or character serves as a powerful reminder of the work I’m putting on my readers’ imaginations each time I invent something new, when I could have just as well employed what I already have.
With a bit of brainstorming and perusing my current collection, I work out the trials Belle and the Beast overcome, first moving her out of the dungeon and into a bedroom I furnish with rococo furniture. This search also inspires the furniture cast of Mrs. Potts, Lumiere, Cogsworth, and so on. I grab a couple shots of feasts, knowing that eating a meal together is one of the greatest signs of companionship between people. I’ll balance my story so their rocky relationship starts with a bad dinner, and evolves to the point of a lovely dinner some weeks later, along with a romantic ballroom scene. I gather ball gowns and suits the same way I gathered other pins to represent my protagonists, and collect bright ballrooms to set the scene.
Slow Your Roll
This ballroom scene is the climax of Act II, and the most iconic moment in my story. I want to slow things down and really dwell in this moment, especially since it comes after a montage of little triumphs that built it up. This is another reason to grab more pins than I think I’ll need to convey my point. I could just use one ballroom shot and a silhouetted dance to represent the scene. But dedicating twenty pins to the scene instead of two gives it a dominating presence on the board, emphasizing that this scene is the big moment we’ve been waiting for. When I scroll to this segment, it takes up the entirety of my screen and my focus, exactly the way I want this scene to fill my readers’ minds once it’s written.
After this point, I have just about everything I need. Belle has to be sent into Gaston’s clutches, so working with what I already have, I use her father as bait to lure her back home. All I need is a way for her to receive the news, and a final catalyst to push Gaston over the edge. I could add two elements, one for each problem, but keeping in spirit with the lesson I learned before about simplification, I bundle it all into one. A magic mirror that Belle can use to show any person she asks for. I grab a couple mirror pins and call it finished.
Photo by Szabo Viktor on Unsplash
Playing Tetris
Here comes the tedious part: organization. I like to order my boards so the start of the story is at the top, but by default Pinterest puts your oldest pins at the bottom. Worse, there’s no easy way to move pins in a group, so I’ll have to go one by one and reorder everything I need. It’s a great pain, but it does force me to think critically about each part of my story, highlighting any gaps I missed. I think of it as a necessary suffering, like a second round of edits.
In general, I try to tell my story from left to right, just as I would read it on a page. I work broadly at first, knowing that Pinterest will reshuffle my pins every time I move one. Like a first draft, you have to treat the first pass at organizing everything as a rough estimate, rather than a polished piece. Later, I'll go in and meticulously shuffle each and every pin until they're exactly where I want them.
I grab a forest shot to establish the setting before anything else, and bring up a few stained glass pins I want to use both to establish the castle and the transitions I’ll be using throughout the board. Then cluster all the witch pins together, grab a rose or two, and one of each Beast trait I’ll be using to represent his character. I bring up an extra teapot pin to remind myself of the servants I’m transforming as well. Then I grab a few village pins, and the process repeats for each scene.
Some scenes have only a couple pins, offering a vague implication of what’s happening. But so long as I remember the shorthand, that’s fine. Particularly if the scene is small and serves to keep the plot ball in the air. The scene of Belle’s father setting out, for example, consists of just three pins: a pile of wood and a collection of gears, to represent the machine he plans to sell, and a rider on a horse to show his leaving. What’s more important is the scene that follows, where he runs into wolves. I grab a handful of pins from my large wolf collection and spend a good seven pins just on the fight that leaves him stranded.
Once I get to the point where Belle is exploring the castle while her father returns to the village and warns Gaston, I start to struggle. My transition pins work best when I can line them up across the board, but I don’t actually need very many pins to show Belle’s dinner with the furniture staff or Gaston’s moping in the tavern. I wouldn’t have enough of either scene to fill a line across the board. If I stuck to my usual methods, my transition pins would outweigh the scene pins, and it would become a confusing hodgepodge of snow forests and hunting paraphernalia. I have to think of something else.
Looking at my transition pins, many of them are quite tall. That gives me an idea: I can divide the board in half for these two scenes, building a barrier in the middle with a couple of my transition pieces to mark where one scene stops and the other begins. This shows both scenes are happening simultaneously, without losing either or emphasizing one over the other. Once Gaston’s scene ends, I can extend Belle’s exploration of the castle out to fill the entire board once more, ending our separation and conveniently putting emphasis on one of the most important scenes of this point in the story: Belle discovering the rose and the Beast’s curse.
Filling in the Blanks
I look at my pins. At this point, we’re in Act II and going through the allies and trials phase. I know I want to shift from enemies to friends here. But I also know Belle isn’t the type to see a man’s sad past and forgive his cruel actions. I need the Beast to show her he has kindness in his heart before they can ever hope to bond.
There are still several wolf pins that I set aside thinking they’d be useful, though I never assigned them a specific purpose. This sparks an idea. I wanted the wolves to be the reason Belle couldn’t leave the castle, but maybe she will challenge that. Maybe she’s willing to brave the wilderness, until she’s surrounded and in great danger. And then, the Beast comes to save her and is wounded on her behalf. That’ll convince her to stay and talk to him about the curse.
From there, it's all downhill skiing. I bring up some leftover library pins to show the Beast sharing interests with Belle and the two growing close. I also gather the handful of short quotes on solid backgrounds I gathered over the course of my searches. These snippets of possible conversations between characters are the perfect little punch I can add to show the shift of the relationship as we go. Littering transitions here and there between bright pictures and quotes implies the passage of time, creating a relationship building montage pushing us to the climax. I cap it all off with my large collection of ball pins and slow the tempo at the end to emphasize that pivotal moment we've all been waiting for.
The Final Countdown
The end of the story is already clear in my head. I don’t need very many pins to remind myself of the final beats. I just need a mirror and a wolf eye amidst a couple of village pins to mark Belle showing the Beast in her magic mirror to the villagers. Then a few ominous quotes from Gaston’s point of view and a shot of hands chained up shows him imprisoning her. At this point I hadn’t yet decided how she would break out, but among my leftover pins I have some gears and a hatchet – a perfect way to implement Chekhov’s gun and bring back her father’s invention. Once again, it’s all about the 'waste not want not want' mentality.
After that, I have everything else I need already waiting for me at the bottom of my board. I put in a couple forest and horse scenes to show movement, then a couple balcony shots to establish the final battle’s setting. With my last Beast pins, I organize them in reverse order of the transformation at the start, ending with a shirtless man clutching himself and a quote about coming back from the dead. Tack an ‘I love you,’ and a ‘Happily Ever After,’ on the end, delete the pins I didn’t use, and it’s finished! All that’s left to do is nitpick and carefully shuffle the rougher patches until it’s all in perfect arrangement.
Take a look at the final product here!
Hopefully now you can see how you can plot a novel entirely in Pinterest boards. Being a very visual person, I love this method, and I can’t wait to plot out the second book of The Sallow Witch Saga soon.
Do you think you’ll use the Pinterest method to plot your next novel? Let me know how you’d use or change this process!
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