Brainstorming: Tapping your Resources

"Every nightmare hints at the secret reserves of imaginative power in the human mind. What the stalled or not-yet-started writer needs is some magic for getting in touch with himself, some key." --John Gardner

Suggestions for Brainstorming:

• Clustering or mindmapping
• Keep a writer's journal
• Free writing or timed practices
• Walk/exercise/yoga
• Create a collage
• Dabble with paints, watercolors, colored pencils
• Draw a map or picture of the story you're writing
• Write about or draw a significant dream
• Make a list of all the things that bring you joy

21 Exercises:

1. Make a time line of your life and include the 10 most important events.
2. Find a photo of one of your mentors and paste in the middle of a blank page. Fill the rest of the page with all the things this person has taught you.
3. Recall a time when you were hurt, embarrassed or confused. Create a mindmap of the experience, then free write for 10-15 minutes, telling the complete story.
4. List all the jobs you've ever worked. Write about the job that was most difficult, fun or challenging.
5. Write an action scene where a character encounters an enemy.
6. Write about an important discovery that you made.
7. Write about a family story that has been repeated often. Try telling it from a completely different point of view.
8. Rewrite a fairy tale.
9. Make a list of all your teachers and class mates from your childhood.
10. Write about a room or house from your childhood, work to make the details come alive.
11. Write about a time in your life when you were most afraid.
12. Write a guideline of the 10 essentials qualities to be a real man or real woman.
13. Write about the worst argument you ever participated in.
14. Write about what your life would be life if it were perfect.
15. Make a list of all the unanswerable questions you can think of.
16. Write about a relationship or friendship that soured or ended.
17. Write a scene from a time in history that you always wished you had lived.
18. Write about an event in your life as if it were a dream, including surrealistic or bizarre aspects.
19. Write a letter to someone from your past and update them on what has happened in your life.
20. Write a story that begins "I am waiting for the plane to land andÉ."
21. Write a story that is only told in dialogue.

"I always do the first line well, but I have trouble with all the other." --Moliere

"All the fun is in how you say a thing. " --Robert Frost

"A simple style is like white light. Although complex, it does not appear to be so." --Anatole France

"If I chance to talk a little wild, forgive me." --Shakespeare

©Jessica Page Morrell
For more information contact:
Jessica Morrell | Email: jesswrites@juno.com