The biggest struggle of writing for me is having inspiration. Inspiration is not static, it comes and goes in waves, you could be writing away for days and hit all the right points and everything flows like it’s supposed to be, or you could go a month without putting pen on paper (or more recently, typing in a blank doc) just because you have nothing meaningful to write about, or you feel as though you lack the words to write about what’s important to you. Sometimes we already know what we want to write about and sometimes, we desperately look for inspiration everywhere, anywhere. I found that this applies for any kind of writing. I’m a poet and a blogger, but I’m also a student and writing slumps are just as common in each of these areas.
As a writer, I get times during which I feel very inspired to work on something, words come very easily to me and I fall into a trance-like state of mind for hours or even days, during which nothing is more important that putting my ideas down. These periods of times are short-lived though and most of the time, I don’t really have this big thing I want to write about. But because I have to put up blog posts in time and meet coursework deadlines at uni, it’s essential that writing must be done every day. For that purpose, every time inspiration fails to come around when expected, I use different brainstorming techniques to keep the ideas flowing. In this post, I am going to share some of these techniques with you.
These exercises help me carry on writing even (and especially) when inspiration is scarce, and they turn writing into a daily practice rather than just a hobby. Some of them are designed specifically for creative writing, but you will find that some of them apply broadly to any type of writing. I cannot take credit for any of them – some of them have been shared with me, and some of them might be quite popular with other writers but I just don’t know that for sure.
Regardless, let’s start!
1) Brain-dumping within a time limit.
This should be quite a commonly known one, but one of my university teachers passed it on to me during a research lecture and frankly, I was shocked I didn’t hear about it sooner. It’s easy, accessible, quick and an almost-guaranteed start for the piece you want to write. Get yourself a blank sheet of paper or open up a new document on your laptop, and write all the ideas you can come up with around the focus of your writing. Write them down as they come to you, don’t pause to flesh them out or reword them in any way, but dump them on the paper in their raw, unedited form. Set yourself a time limit (let’s say, five or ten minutes) to prevent yourself from thinking too much about your ideas or refining them. In case you’re eager to start doing the actual writing, limiting the time you spend brain-dumping will help you make sure that you come back to your unprocessed -ideas sooner rather than later, and possibly find inspiration while browsing them.
I found this technique helpful for blog posts, poems, short stories and coursework alike. It is also a good starting point for writing something you’re not particularly excited about, on which you might be tempted to procrastinate and for which you would lose your inspiration in the process. I even use brain-dumping in my journaling: it feels refreshing to let it all out at once, as if you’re throwing up all your thoughts and emotions and feel better afterwards (great metaphor indeed). Finally, it is a great avenue for practising writing every day; if you’re like me, you get rusty if you take a lengthy break from writing. With brain-dumping, you can write every day with nothing in particular in mind, develop your style and maybe even find some interesting ideas in the process.
Sometimes, a lot of brainstorming goes behind the posts I put up on the blog.
(source: personal archive)
2) Make a character sheet.
I learned a lot about building fictional characters throughout my first-year optional module on creative writing skills. Back when I was more into writing prose rather than poetry, coming up with good, relatable, less annoying characters was a real struggle. That and writing good dialogue. When we started practising creating characters, we used character sheets with numerous fields to complete on our characters’ physical appearance, personality, preferences and life experience. We were encouraged to write as much about our characters as possible, even bits and bobs that would never make the final story, because they would make the character more real in our eyes, as if we were getting to know a person better when we make friends with them. For my character sheets, I came up with backstories for the tattoos my characters had, details on their dress sense, proclivities and bad habits, even what they’d usually have for breakfast or what music they would listen to in the car.
Although using a character sheet might sound like an obvious thing to do when you write fiction, I thought it was important for me to make this suggestion because for a long time, I only barely used character sheets myself. I was usually so excited to bring my characters to life, that I rushed to throw them right in the middle of the action rather than take my time to create them. Making a character sheet is also a great way to expand on characters that you’ve already created, but you ran out of inspiration for or you feel as though they haven’t reached their peak state. I also found that it makes writing about characters you might’ve got a bit bored with, more fun.
3) Write to music.
This is a technique specifically fork my fellow synaesthetes (I wrote about what being a synaesthete means here), although if you don’t believe you have synaesthesia, it’s worth trying anyway in case it does work for you. When I fail to get where I want especially as far as creative writing is concerned, music saves me more often than not. If I want to create a certain kind of scene within my story or write a poem about a certain topic or experience of mine, and I can’t seem to come up with the right words or the right vibes for it, I will play a song somewhere along the lines of what I want to say and wait for inspiration to come. Most of the time it does, and often listening to music will make me explore ideas or avenues I haven’t even thought of considering before. By all means, it doesn’t have to be your favourite music: I found that different genres will fuel me with inspiration for different kinds of writing. While I am studying or writing coursework, I like playing chill, R’n’B’ tunes from a randomised Spotify playlist. I like using movie soundtracks to create a proper atmosphere for writing a fictional story. Yadda yadda yadda.
If you’re writing a creative piece and you feel as though you’re simply not on the right track, play a few songs that you think can potentially inspire you and get you in the appropriate mindset for writing. If you’re afraid you won’t be able to concentrate on the task at hand anymore because you’re listening to music, find yourself music on the same rhythm as your train of thought and take frequent breaks from it, so to still make the most out of its creative effect.
While at university, I keep my creative materials short but sweet: I put all drafts and excerpts in my portfolio, and ideas in the works go into my composition book.
(source: personal archive)
4) Place your writing in a context.
I found this to be rather useful for fictional writing endeavours, either short stories or novels or poetry and lyrics. When I feel like I’m not making the creative progress I want with my piece, I usually take a break and place my project into a wider context. Let’s say, for a character that hasn’t reached its final form yet, I would write an excerpt that will develop it more and won’t make the final edit. A more recent example: for a poem that I wrote (which I will hopefully share with you guys soon!) and had so much trouble finding the right style for, I wrote a short, story-like fragment filled with ideas that I wanted in the final poem, without them becoming actual lyrics. Building up sort of a background for the thoughts and feelings I wanted to portray, getting the right atmosphere and the right vibe for it. Just like with brain-dumping, placing your writing in a context means putting your thoughts out there in a form or another, but also putting an actual order to them so to build yourself a path to the main idea that you want to get to.
This, I think, is my favourite brainstorming technique because it feels like writing without actually moving forward with what you write. It involves creative energy and effort and the result is something you can add to your portfolio, in case you haven’t managed to make progress on your main piece. It is also a fun, productive way of exploring any other ideas you avoided in writing your first story or poem, without them playing a pivotal role in your creative outlet. They will just be there when you need them, if you need them.
5) Get help from other people.
Again, this might sound like an obvious one but it hasn’t been for me, because even now, at almost 21 years old and around seven years of writing under my belt, I am reluctant about sharing my work with others. It’s not criticism that I’m afraid of – taking a creative writing module during my first year of university meant that I had to read my ideas out to people and receive their feedback, and even when it was negative, I still had a pleasant feeling that I shared my work with somebody. If anything, I am just afraid of learning that maybe I shouldn’t be writing to begin with – that I’m too bad at it or my ideas are plain and uninteresting and all my efforts and hours spent on it are in vain. Maybe asking other people for feedback or support with your writing feels scary to you, too, but from experience I can say that it can possibly be one of the best things to happen to your writing, ever.
As far as inspiration goes, talking to other people about your writing will introduce you to ideas or creative paths yet unexplored by you. They can read your work, notice something might be missing or thinking something can actually make the experience better, point you at this one thing that you never even thought about considering, and boom, your writing evolves. In my case, studying creative writing completely changed my vision towards writing prose, and as a result of that, my style and approach to it. Or if you do something right and it tells your writing apart from any other piece read in the same sitting, people can highlight these things for you and you will know what your strong points are. Regardless, somebody else’s feedback will always push your writing forward. If possible, find yourself an active support system of fellow writers and help each other out to become better and enjoy writing more.
My messy 'creative drawer' back in my family home. Here I used to keep all my drafts, notes and creative ideas, disorganised yet in a perfectly logical order.
(source: personal archive)
What are some of the techniques that you use to brainstorm, come up with new ideas and get the inspiration going when you feel stuck with your writing? I’m eager to find out what your suggestions are, if you wish to leave them in the comments section down below!
Also, I would appreciate if you let me know how you’re enjoying writing-related posts on the blog. Would you like to see more of this in the future? I am trying to figure out the creative direction that the blog will take in the following months and I want to check whether writing should be part of the brand!
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Photo sources: personal archive.