The card method.
Ideas on cards, a surface big enough, and your hands. Writers have worked this way for seventy years.
Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita on index cards, out of order, and said why:
“The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done.”
— The Paris Review, Art of Fiction No. 40, 1967
McPhee
John McPhee, the New Yorker's long-form master, spreads his on plywood and looks:
“I strewed the cards face up on the plywood… I didn't stare at those cards for two weeks, but I kept an eye on them all afternoon. Finally, I found myself looking back and forth between two cards.”
— “Structure”, The New Yorker, 2013; Draft No. 4
Rodriguez
Robert Rodriguez still carries a pack, and lays the cards out to see the film:
“Creative spirit, in my theory is, it doesn't have hands. It's waiting for you to get off your ass, and pick up the pen.” · “You just have to be the hands.”
— The Tim Ferriss Show #804 · Lex Fridman #465
The writers' room
Vince Gilligan's room built Breaking Bad on corkboards — “index cards with sharpies, and each card represents… a beat within a scene.” Blake Snyder's Save the Cat teaches the same board for screenplays. Joseph Heller planned Catch-22 for a year on note cards before writing a line. Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird: “I believe in index cards.”
Why it works
Three things, and every one of them is physical. Cards you can make, so a thought is one object. A surface big enough to see all of it at once. And nobody asking you to organise before you have thought — the structure comes out of the spread, not before it.
What Cardigani keeps
The cards, the surface, the hands. Drag, tilt, resize, connect, with chunky targets and no dialogs. No template, no wizard, no name-first. And never less than paper: export everything any time — the boards as pictures, the cards as text — and if you stop paying your decks stay readable, forever.
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