Saturday, November 30, 2013

Writing Tips: Brainstorming

For brainstorming, there really isn’t a particular way you can brainstorm. People think in different ways and brainstorming is easier in different ways for different people. Here are just some ideas I can give people based off my own experience.
1.      Always carry around a pen and paper with you. Ideas can come to you at any time, and by any time I literally mean anytime. I’ve gotten a lot of ideas in the middle of class one day, in the car, at the movies, and all sorts of other strange places.
2.      When you get an idea, WRITE IT DOWN! I cannot stress how important this is. There are many occasions when I thought of a really good idea and didn’t have any time to write it down, and then forgot it later, and it either took me several days to remember it again, or I never remembered it at all.
3.      Take time to think. Thinking about the different possibilities is something that can really help me to think of more ideas. For me personally, the time before I fall asleep at night and a long car drive are the times that are most productive for me.
4.      Take inspiration from things in your own life. Sometime you take a lot of time trying to think of some crazy creative idea when the best thing to write about is what’s right in front of you. When you take inspiration from things in your own life, it also makes your writing more personal, and it might even effect your writing style.
5.      Other tips there are a lot of other brainstorming techniques that I know of but don’t personally use because they don’t work for me, but they work for plenty of other people.
a.       Make a Web: those are those things that you make for school when brainstorming for an essay, and even though they are helpful for essay writing, they can also be very useful for creative writing as well. So basically, just think of any random word you can think of and put it in the center circle. Then, you just start branching off ideas for things that relate to that word.
b.      Free Writing: This is basically you take out a piece of paper and write anything that comes into your mind, not matter how stupid and random it is. The point is, is that once you take the time and read it over, something you wrote down, whether it be a word, a phrase, or an idea will spark some kind of inspiration.
c.       Writing Prompts: When you get really desperate and need something to write, or you just aren’t accomplishing anything from the brainstorming that you’ve attempted, then start to look for writing prompts. You can find these all over the internet, and all you have to do search “writing prompts” and a whole bunch of them should show up. If you look through enough of them, one of them is bound to interest you.
                                                                                                             
~K.M.D.

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