Articles
Here's a view of creativity worth reading. It mentions mindmapping only briefly but it does provide a hint to one of the ways around creative blockage. I've added one of my own at the foot. [Vic]
Mind mapping can help with creativity – it frees you from the rigidity of lists for example – and with its visual approach stimulates alternative ways of viewing a problem. But here, Joann adds a barrage of other techniques to help you crack barriers to creativity. [Vic]
I didn't see why this shouldn't work all the year round. No need to wait for the New Year - here it is. [Vic]
This is a good, quick description of what mindmapping is, when applied to its use for note taking. It’s a little short on specifics and examples, so you’ll have to browse further on mind-mapping.org for those. [Vic]
Whether you have vegetable or royal aspirations, I can confirm that you'll find mindmapping a great way of calming yourself down when you have many calls on your time, ideas buzzing round your head and objectives to meet. But it must fit your own personal style of thinking, and you must set aside the time to do it! That's how I bust stress, not by mapping out my stressful times. But we're all different, and maybe this will work for you. [Vic]
Resources 
Excerpt form a letter written by Jacques Raverat to Virginia Woolf September 1924 from Vence, (Vence is in the south of France, just 10 miles north of Nice) as reported on NPR on May 23, 2004 by LINDA WERTHEIMER, host:
`My dear Virginia, one of the things I find most difficult about writing is that it has to be essentially linear. I mean you can only write or read one thing at a time, and even memory doesn't alter this fact. Now that's not at all the way my mind works. When you write a word like "neopaganism," for instance, it's as if you threw a pebble into a pond. There are splashes in the outer air in every direction, and under the surface waves that follow one another into dark and forgotten corners of my past. You are not only a writer, but a printer, and you'll see how difficult it would be to represent this odd phenomenon. One could perhaps, in the middle of a large sheet of paper, write the word "neopaganism" and then radially bits of sentences like this: Shame at the absurdities of my youth. Apologies if they really annoyed you. But almost impossible to believe that you can have taken them seriously. A desire to defend it. A desire to counterattack. Etc. Etc. And all this you see simultaneously, though even so it's only what happens on the surface.'