Best Brainstorming Exercises For Writers

Best Brainstorming Exercises For Writers: A writer must constantly use his creative muscle to be at the top of his or her game. Here are ten diverse and interesting brainstorming exercises to help you use that creative muscle to the best of your ability. And if all else fails, there are always writing prompts to get your gears going!

Knitting Technique

In this technique, you choose five random words. These can be words that someone else gives you, you choose from the dictionary or from the top of your head or that you encounter somewhere. And then you create five mini stories with each of the words as a prompt. After that is done, you brainstorm one big story that can encompass all of these mini stories. This is one way to think of a story for a novel with five readymade episodes.

Picture-esque

In this activity, you browse pictures. You can do this on the Internet on Getty Images, on social media, in adult picture books or even photograph books. Raghu Rai’s photo books are great for this purpose. Once you come across a photograph you like, or which impacts you, choose the world of the photograph as your setting. And then construct a story set in that world, or use cues from the photo to direct the course of your story.

Rapid Ideation

This activity is divided into two parts, each can be however long you want it to be, but five minutes per part is good enough. The first part of the activity can be summarized in one word – ’think’. Basically, you just go on a thinking spree and carefully observe whatever thoughts come to mind. As a passive observer, don’t intervene, stop, change or direct their course in any way. And in the second part, write without thinking. Here, you don’t let your thoughts interfere in any way with your writing. After that is done, analyze what you wrote.

Mind Mapping

Mapping is a visual representation of associative ideas which sparks the imagination more readily than non-visual, intangible ideas. Here, you write one or more central themes or characters or plot points on a chart and link the smaller characters or themes to them. Thus, you basically make a diagram of words or images to see which of your ideas fit in together or which are compatible with each other. This can spark even more ideas that are relevant.

Starbursting

This technique can be used if you have a rough plot in mind already but need to flesh it out more. Basically, you put a central theme, character, or plot point at the middle, and construct a five pointer star around it. At the end of each point, you write five questions – who, what, when, where, why and how. And then you spend time answering these questions in whichever way you think best works for you.

Reflection

In this brainstorming technique, you set a timer for five or ten minutes and analyze closely the last book you read. While doing this, you pay special attention to what you loved very much about the story other than the plot. Was it the genre, the mood, the character development or the pace? Then you choose what you liked best and emulate that as a starting point for your story. However, be careful not to plagiarize or blindly imitate.

Sensory Search

This is also often used as a grounding technique in psychology, but can be a great creative exercise too. Under this, you basically name five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste around you. Then you write a story that connects most, if not all of these. This prompt is great because it allows you to write sensorily rich stories with a definite setting.

Word Association

Under this exercise, you basically think of a random word – perhaps an object that is closest to you at any given point of time. You note it down on a piece of paper. Then you think of the first word that comes to your mind when you think of the original word and write that. And then you write the third word that comes in mind when you think of the word and so on. After a long association series, you randomly pick out five words and construct a story.

Looping

In this technique, you make use of several freewriting exercises one after the other. Freewriting exercises refer to emptying your mind on a piece of paper by simply writing whatever comes to your mind. Very likely, everything you write will not be Wordsworth kind of material. But if you do this several times in a row, you might come across some eloquent sentences that start off a train of thought regarding the plot. Or you might discover patterns that recur, telling you that something is on your mind.

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