Brainstorming Techniques – The Spark that Lights a Story

As a writer, there’s only one thing I dread more than editing: looking at a blank page. Sometimes, I struggle with how to start a story or find it hard to pick up a work in progress to keep going. The struggle is real, and I’ve never met a writer that hasn’t encountered it. Finding the right brainstorming techniques, however, will help you overcome the hurdles that your brain can put up. So, let’s look at some ways you can get your mind flowing.

Basic Brainstorming Techniques

Depending on the kind of project I’m working on, or where my inspiration comes from, I have a few brainstorming techniques that help me get my ideas out of my head and onto the page.

Outlining

Outlining is probably my favorite tool. When I say outline, I don’t mean the kind we learned to make in school for writing essays. These are more like … section by section summaries. I look at an idea in my head and start considering what scenes will look like. Once I have those ideas, I write a brief summary. I group them by major beats that I want to hit, so a summary may contain a single scene, or multiple scenes, depending. Below is an example of one of the early outlines I had for my upcoming novel, Book of Nathan.

1. Start with Darius watching the funeral of Susan. Let HIM play the pronoun game until he sees Marilyn and Devon together.
2. Marilyn at the ICU. She’s unconscious. She suffered major blood loss, but she is stable. However, she won’t wake up even though she’s on the mend and medically should be able to. Doctor discusses findings with Stan while Sheila sits next to Marilyn. After the doctor leaves, Devon arrives. Some conversation with Stan and Sheila then they leave. Devon begins reading Midnight’s Requiem to Marilyn, hoping she’ll wake up just to tell him to stop.
3. Into Marilyn’s head. Marilyn is moving through her past life memories, trying to get away from her own pain and guilt. Some part of her knows the cause of her mother’s cancer and she feels responsible. Here, we see a memory of the Carpathians and fending off invasion from the Turks. Someone has come to help – Darius, though Marilyn calls him Nathan. He is helping to fortify against the Turks, whose leader seems driven by a deep passion. She’s already lost lots of men, including her husband.

If I’m writing a novel or a novella, this kind of outline is a pre-writing tool. However, if I’m writing a short story, this kind of outline serves more like a first draft, allowing me to get the basic beats of my story down, then focus on bringing it fully to life with prose. The Outline is, though, a guide, not a hard and fast rule. Sometimes, things change as I’m writing the story and sometimes, I’ll change the outline before drafting ever begins.

Freewriting

Freewriting is a technique I usually struggle with. If I’m already struggling to put an idea to paper, sitting down to free write can seem almost … impossible. But … if I have a certain kind of idea and feel a certain kind of energy from it, freewriting can be liberating. The most important thing to remember with freewriting, though, is that you’re not supposed to stop or backspace. The entire point of freewriting is to just get the idea out. It doesn’t have to make sense or be coherent.

It just has to be.

What I find is that I’ve sometimes sat down with the intention to utilize freewriting, struggled, and found myself outlining instead. That’s not a bad thing. It just means that I wasn’t quite to the point of putting the prose together for the story. Maybe I hadn’t settled on a point of view yet. Maybe I didn’t quite feel the voice. Sometimes, I just couldn’t feel the flow of the words. In a way, it’s still freewriting, the structure of that writing is just different, summary instead of prose.

Mind-Mapping

Sometimes you have an idea, but you might struggle with where that idea is going. You don’t quite have enough to put the plot beats into an outline and you haven’t found that flow for freewriting. In that case, Mind-Mapping might be just the perfect brainstorming technique for you.

With mind-mapping, you find the central point of your idea and begin creating a word map of ideas that branch from it. This example is just one form of mind-mapping, taking a central idea and then branching off with the basic questions: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. From those questions, just begin answering as many as you can.

This isn’t the only kind of mind-map. You could have the central circle be a person, then map out the different people that know them. Or it could be an event, and then you map out smaller events around it, that might cause or be caused by the central event.

The point of the mind-map is to give you a visual picture of a basic idea. These small ideas begin to branch out and help you form a narrative as you build out the map.

Interrogate Your Idea

It’s not as harsh as it sounds. This technique works well when you have a small idea with no direction or you want to find an idea altogether.

Orson Scott Card talks about using this technique in Characters & Viewpoint. What you’re doing is basically starting with something simple and asking casual questions until you tease out an idea to build upon. So, you might start with a simple character or a basic idea. Then you ask questions. Who is this person? Who would have this idea or feel this thing? If it’s a place, you might ask, who would be there?

When you interrogate ideas like this, you should rarely settle on the first answer that comes to mind. As you advance in your questions, get difficult. Put up roadblocks that prevent the first answer you come up with from working. Eventually, you’ll ask enough questions to decide if your idea has legs. At that point, you can move on to mind-mapping and putting the idea into a logical format, or you can start outlining or freewriting.

Putting It Together

As writers, we rarely use only one brainstorming technique. A mind-map or idea interrogation might turn into an outline or freewriting. You might start freewriting, then find the heart of your idea and start outlining the plot beats.

Writing Prompt

For this week’s writing prompt, find a basic item on your desk – your pen, the mousepad, or even a piece of lint. Look at the object, and then brainstorm.

The Plot Hook: Something about this very plain object on your desk is about to trigger a crisis that threatens your entire city.

Choose a brainstorming technique to help you find ideas about how this plain object is going to potentially cause city-wide chaos. Remember, you don’t have to stick to only one technique.

Sources:
Card, Orson Scott. Elements of Fiction Writing – Characters & Viewpoint. Writer’s Digest Books, 1999