My latest WIP is about time travel and parallel universes and has been a reason for excitement ever since the idea popped into my brain. I knew from the beginning that the story had to simmer. I wanted to get the details right before I put pen to paper. There is such a thing as starting a novel too soon and I refused to make that mistake. What really helped me was to make a mood board. I’m a visual person and I needed to drag all these ideas, these images into one place. Thank you, Pinterest. You can also simply print images and paste them in your notebook, but either way, I recommend combining mood boards and your writing.

The process

I started by finding images related to time travel. The fun thing is that when you look for images, you might stumble onto something that you wouldn’t have thought of yourself. It is very inspiring and you might find that what you had in mind first changes for the better. I created a special Pinterest board that I lock so nobody can see it but me. It wouldn’t make sense to anyone else anyway. If you paste images in your notebook then you don’t really have that issue, but you could still get a fire breathing dragon to protect it.

Over the next few weeks, I collected images of characters. For instance, my main character takes a deaf girl under her wings so I added adorable mother-daughter pictures. But somehow I also found images of playing cards and somehow that fit. I ended up using playing cards in my novel in and it was a cool idea that I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise.

Benefits

The images you collect set a certain mood and paint pictures of scenes, conversations between characters, and even conflict. They say that a picture says more than a thousand words and if you find the right picture, it does. Other than looking for obvious elements of your story, you can also look for images related to the themes of your novel, character flaws, outfits, locations, and of course certain objects or pets that are part of your novel.

At the same time, you can also make an aesthetic of your current project. It is one image with multiple pictures related to your novel. Writers make them so that potential readers can get a taste of the story in one glance. That is also something you can do, especially if you want to share it at some point and get people excited. But first, make sure that you get excited. Start now and feel free to share your mood boards or aesthetic!