Workflowy for Outlining & Brainstorming Short Stories

By

May 3, 2019

I came across a fantastic show-and-tell by Brandon Abbott on how he uses WorkFlowy to outline and brainstorm short stories… so I reached out to him and asked him to put together a screencast for us.

In Brandon’s own words:

“I write fiction the way a squirrel crosses the street. Sometimes I need a little direction. For years, I’ve used Workflowy to corral my wayward thoughts, organize large projects, take meetings notes, and more. Now, I’ve discovered that it’s also a great tool for creative writing. Workflowy gives my brain the freedom to be creative by removing the clutter of disorganization.”

In the following screencast, Brandon walks us through brainstorming character development, using pre-made templates, tagging to track ideas and more.

A couple of resources

shared outline of the exact same templates seen in the screencast.

The story, “Rose,” which won the contest mentioned in the screencast.

Brandon Abbott lives in Nashville, TN, where he serves as a minister and lives with his wife and three children. To read more by Brandon, including his short stories, check out his blog.

If you’ve got a WorkFlowy story to tell, please drop me a line: frank@workflowyacademy.com

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

4 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
trackback

[…] The Writing Cooperative about how he uses Workflowy for fiction writing. And he even did a screencast exclusively for Workflowy! Since Bradon’s piece, Workflowy has created its templates feature—which make things like […]

frank.dg
frank.dg
4 years ago

Hey Peter… you create notes for lists/ bullets by using the keyboard shortcut Shift+Enter… or via the bullet hover menu there’s an option. On mobile when you are in edit mode, above the keyboard you’ll see a note + pencil icon that you can tap to create a note.

Peter Nathschläger
4 years ago
Reply to  frank.dg

Thanks for the quick response 🙂 I should look out more carefully when getting familiar with a new app instead of asking such things 🙂

Peter Nathschläger
4 years ago

Hi,

thanks for the informative video. It also raised the question (for me), how he is doing the kind of subtitles without bullets? With the smaller font …

Thanks,
Peter

Subscribe to the newsletter

We'll send you a weekly roundup of the latest posts

Overwhelmed?

Workflowy replaces your notebooks, stickies and bloated apps with a simple, smooth digital notebook that makes it easy to get organized and be productive.