There are many different techniques you can use to get your mind working and spark the creativity fire. Successful writers will try different techniques at different times to generate ideas for their writing. Here are a few techniques you can try to generate your ideas to write about.
Brainstorming
Meaning literally to create a storm in your brain by generating ideas quickly one after the other, this technique means you need to generate your ideas and then assess the ideas to see if you have come up with any good ones. You can use a couple of techniques to brainstorm individually.
One is to write down the topic and then spend five to ten minutes listing every single associated idea with that topic. Some ideas will be thrown away and others will be modified or used. The main concept of brainstorming is to generate as many ideas as possible in a short space of time.
I like to spend a few minutes at the start of each work day when my mind is likely to be fresh. Creative ideas then tend to flow, with me just typing in title ideas onto a list. This list then jogs my memory of great ideas to write about whenever I need a new topic. It’s also a fantastic exercise to get your mind thinking about writing, before you get started for the day.
Mindmapping
Mindmapping uses key terms and phrases and links them in a graphic way. If you tend to be a visual learner, you will find this technique extremely useful because you end up with a picture at the end of it. To successfully create a mindmap, you start with a clear piece of paper. YES – get away from the computer screen!
Draw a bubble, circle or box in the middle of the page and write your topic in it. Then draw several lines out from the bubble and create several smaller bubbles at the end of each line. In each secondary bubble, place a key term or phrase that relates to the topic. Then under each secondary bubble, write as many ideas as you can that relate to that key phrase.
Once you have completed the process for each secondary bubble, you can then get out some colored pens and draw interconnecting lines to ideas that relate to each other. This can be used to give you a structure for your writing on that topic, and can help you divide your ideas into sections, chapters or articles that go together.
Using a mindmap can not only generate ideas, but helps you link them together so that the structure of your writing flows smoothly from one idea to the next. There is also some great free mindmapping software out there like Freemind which has versions for both Mac and PC users.
Reframing
This is a great technique to use when you are particularly stuck for ideas on a topic requested by a client. Most freelance writers end up writing some articles and works that are not within their comfort zone and familiar ways of thinking. Using the reframing technique can encourage you to generate ideas by reframing the question or topic you need to write about and by helping you to see the topic from different perspectives.
- You can create a simple grid, with a question or topic box in the middle of the page and four boxes around it
- Then think of four people who might be related to the topic and would have a different perspective on it. If you are writing about the health system, for example, you might consider the perspectives of the patients, the doctors, the nurses and health insurance funds (or those who pay for the services). All of these people would have a different perspective on the issues and problems relating to the health system
- Then you can make a list of what each group of people’s concerns are most likely to be
Using the reframing technique can help you to generate many ideas on what to write about on that particular topic. You may like to write an article for different audiences, using each perspective as a starting point.
These three techniques are useful for thinking about and generating ideas on specific topics, or even to generate ideas on different topics or stories to write about. Giving yourself time to think clearly and creatively about idea generation can also help you to think about the structure of your writing and how ideas will be linked in your work. And this can only make you a better writer!
