You can use mind mapping as a prewriting exercise to figure out exactly what you want to write, to stimulate and sort your ideas into a coherent architecture that will guide your writing. You could also do it in the midst of writing a piece or at the end of a draft, to gain focus, to clarify what you have and reveal what you still need and help you see whether you're actually writing (or have written) what you intended to.

Imagine the basic parts of a set of Tinker Toys: flat wooden disks with holes drilled radially around the edges and colored rods of different lengths and colors. In the imaginary set, the hub sizes — and shapes — are infinitely variable.

PROMPT: First, get some paper and colored pencils or markers. What's the most important, most central narrative thing in your project? It could be a character or a place or an event or something else. Write it down in a word or short phrase in the middle and draw a circle around it for your first Hub.

Then start adding more elements -- events, characters, places, themes, even things like seasons or times of day that recur in an important way. Use different shapes and colors for the hubs of different types of narrative objects. You might have several equally sized main hubs or just one main central one, depending of your material and point of view. Maybe there are five round character hubs, each a different color, one of them the largest and central one, the others arranged around it or in groups that have to do with families or other groups. Do try to match your hubs' size and proximity to the center to their relative importance to the story.

This is not the place for long descriptions; use words, names or short phrases. It should be a sort of exploded bullet list. But importantly, don't make it list-like in the way you arrange it on the page. We're trying to get away from the linear with this exercise. When you're satisfied you have all the hubs you want laid out like Tinker Toy hubs, start connecting them with lines. If you have them, use your colored pens or pencils, like the colored dowels of Tinker Toys, to encode the connections. Maybe blue lines are for friendships and black lines are for enemies. Luckily, the line of your pen is a lot more flexible than the wooden rods, and you can link things any way. Maybe you'll draw circles around groups of hubs to link them, or shade in the hubs to denote time or place. Maybe once you draw it, you'll see that you haven't used the best shape and you'll redraw it. That's good. I sometimes make many of these maps for one story or book, trying out different ways of seeing my material. The goal is to help you see what's important, to more clearly discern (and make use of) the patterns and echoes you've created and to help you see the entirety your story in a non-linear a way, possibly allowing you to prune it, shape, weight, reorder or otherwise totally up-end the piece.

This task is also good for generating new material, because once you see what you have in this way, you might very well end up adding hubs for things you haven't written yet and didn't even plan to.

A related (but more passive) way to assess your text (if you already have a substantial draft), is to use an app to generate a word cloud of it. This will show you visually which words appear most frequently. There are various word cloud generators available online and as add ons to word processing programs.