style - How do you map out your storyline?

There are various ways for mapping out the storyline that you will use for a story. One of them is to create a bullet-point outline, which would theoretically be useful because of the hierarchy system that you can make, but as it goes along you can't really visualise how the story goes along. Another system would be to use mindmaps to map out the storyline, because subsets of one idea could be branched off.

What ways do you use to map out your storyline/content?

Answer

One technique that I've used has been a simple spreadsheet. I make a number of columns, one for every major thread of the novel, and I color each column differently to make them stand out. Then I write a one-sentence summary of each scene and put it in the appropriate column, in chronological order from top to bottom, so that it looks like this:

X  Y  Z
*
   *
   *
      *
*     *

Imagine that X, Y, and Z are characters or subplots, and the asterisks are short scene summaries. In this outline, the action starts with X, moves to Y for two scenes, then to Z, then X and Z are in a scene together.

That way, I can read the chronological sequence of events by reading down all the columns, but I can also which threads aren't getting enough attention, and how the action moves from thread to thread.