Some time ago I posted an entry about writing methods, in which I said that, unlike many writers, I prefer to write directly on the computer rather than draft in longhand. I compose in an editor (vim), which I find is better than a word processor because you concentrate on the text instead of bothering with formatting. If I need it to look fancy, e.g. for a book, I transpose what I've written to LyX.
The logical next step from writing on the computer might seem to be to use more sophisticated tools such as mind-mapping software. I've experimented with some of these and found that Freemind was the best for me. Yet I don't use it. In fact, I don't even use the outlining facility that vim provides, which lets you collapse paragraphs down to a single line.
When I first tried Freemind I was most impressed. It allows you to make tree views of your ideas. Here is an example.

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It ought to be useful for planning any large or complex piece of writing, yet somehow it isn't, at least for me. This tells me something about the way I write, I suppose. I'm not able to plan what I'm going to say in any detail before I actually start to write. At the most, I can jot down half a dozen headings, but if I try to expand these in the way that Freemind allows me to do, I end up with an ever more complicated scheme which I then ignore when I start the real writing. So instead I just put the jottings down at the top of the piece I'm writing and glance at them occasionally, but nothing more. I may alter these sketchy notes as I go on but there is no need to use something like Freemind to do this; in fact, it would be a distraction. What this tells me is that I seem to be one of the probably pretty numerous writers who don't really know what they think until they see what they say.
None of this is meant as a criticism of Freemind, which I think is a brilliant piece of software - and free! I shall probably find a use for it eventually, but not for planning my writing in advance.