"See" Your Story Take Shape With Visual Note-taking

Creating a sketchnote can provide valuable insights as you brainstorm or organize your story.

- BY LIZ MASSEY

Ahh, research. Love it or hate it, a story can't be built without it.

Many writers struggle with forging an article out of piles of background research, interview notes, and attempted outlines. We all know it's better to have a mountain of research than next to nothing, but extracting the value can feel as challenging as mining for precious metals.

In the last year, I've found a reliable tool for shaping research into nonfiction stories. I believe it can work for all kinds of writing—nonfiction, fiction, poetry, even commercial copywriting, or technical communication. The practice of visual note-taking—also known as sketchnoting—has improved my ability to see patterns in my research and helped me define the structure for these stories, leading to the creation of better-written articles with less stress.

One of the pioneers of visual note-taking is Mike Rohde, author of The Sketchnote Handbook and The Sketchnote Workbook. Like many writers, Rohde, whose primary occupation is user experience designer, struggled with taking notes at events and trying to make use of them later. He reached a breaking point in 2007 facing a design conference in Chicago.

Shaking up his normal approach to note-taking, Rohde brought a small Moleskine notebook and a pen to the conference and gave up on the stenographic approach to capturing everything. He created titles and headings with hand-lettered type, and he added small hand-drawn pictures to his notes. The results amazed not only him but his audience on Flickr.

“I was getting comments from people who were not at the event who said, “This is really helpful,” Rohde said. “They would comment, ‘I got value from the notes you took because they were very concise and to the point’ ... That’s when I stopped and said, wait a minute. There's something interesting happening here.”