A moodboard (or "inspiration board") is the perfect way to save inspiration and generate new ideas for your story. It's a technique used by designers, filmmakers, and photographers but works just as well for creative writing.
Moodboards can help you visualize any aspect of your story. Collect and organize relevant character and scene inspiration, reference imagery, or video, then arrange them on Milanote's free-form canvas.
This template is part of our guide on How to plan a novel.
Whether you’re writing a novel or a screenplay, follow this step-by-step guide to learn the modern process of creating a moodboard for your story in Milanote, a free tool used by top creatives.
The Novel Moodboard template contains beautifully composed placeholders for images, video and color swatches. Just drag and drop your content onto the board to create a moodboard in minutes.
Create a new board for your moodboard.
Drag a board out from the toolbar. Give it a name, then double click to open it.
Choose a moodboard template.
Each new board gives you the options to start with a beautiful template.
Now that you've chosen a moodboard template, start adding any existing material you have—this could include images you've saved to your computer as inspiration. Just drag and drop them onto your board.
Drag files from your computer.
Click the "Upload file" button or just drag a file onto your board. You can add images, logos, documents, videos, audio and much more.
The imagery you bring into your moodboard is what helps you express the feel of your story. Images can help you define things like tone, emotion, or a feeling you might be struggling to capture as you're writing. Use Milanote's built-in image library or search for visual elements from around the web.
Use the built-in image library.
Search over 3 million beautiful photos powered by Pexels then drag images straight onto your board.
Install the Milanote Web Clipper
Save images from other websites straight to your board.
Roll over an image (or highlight text), click Save, then choose the destination in Milanote. Return to your board and find the content in the "Unsorted" column on the right.
Color can be a great way to express a particular feel, personality or energy. As painter Johannes Itten said, “Color is life.” Tools like Kuler can be a great starting point for finding colors that work well together. Another trick is to pick colors directly from the images and photos you've added to the board.
Add a color swatch to a board.
Drag a Note card onto your board, enter your colour #HEX code and press enter. E.g. Teal looks like this: #008080
Once you have all your inspiration in one place, the next step is to arrange your ideas to create the perfect composition. Try combining different elements together. This is where you'll start to see new ideas appear. Perhaps the combination of two unrelated images will trigger an exciting new storyline.
Resize your images to add hierarchy.
Drag the corner of an image to resize it. Double-click the corner to return it to its original size.
Crop images.
Double-click an image and press edit to crop or rotate it.
It always helps to bounce ideas off other people. As writer Louisa May Alcott said, "It takes two flints to make a fire." A digital moodboard is especially useful for this step as you can easily connect and collaborate online. Invite a writing partner to add a fresh perspective to your moodboard.
Invite someone else to edit to your board.
Open the "Editors" menu from the title bar of your board. Add email addresses of the people you'd like to collaborate with—they'll receive an invitation via email.
Collaborate in real time.
When multiple people on your team edit a board at once you'll see their updates appear in real-time.
Now that your moodboard is complete, you have a powerful visual reference for your story and hopefully a bunch of new ideas. Remember, you can create multiple moodboards to explore different aspects of your story at any time.
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