Draw a Story Impact Map and find your most creative ideas
Unblock yourself, explore, and find the insights you need to move your story forward
Story Impact Mapping
Story Impact Mapping is a planning technique that connects Story Goals to Characters and the Impact they can have on these goals. For each impact, the Story Impact Map explores one or more Scene Events that cause it, including concrete examples of how each event can appear on the page.
Four questions: Why? Who? What? How?
On the example below, we’re working on the All Is Lost beat of our story. We know that everything has to go wrong, and we’re looking for ideas on how we can make this beat happen. A Story Impact Map comes to the rescue. We complete it by answering four questions.
While reading, follow the example Story Impact Map on the image above. We’ll be filling it up left-to-right.
Why? — Goal
Why is this the All Is Lost beat? Why is it all lost? What happened? Maybe we already know; if so, that’s our goal. If we don’t…
