Brainstorming Your Brain
July 28th, 2010
Brainstorming: to generate creative ideas spontaneously. Sounds simple enough. This is it. You’re sitting at your desk, fingers poised over the keys, eyes trained optimistically on a clean, white, blank screen (or clean, white piece of paper if you happen to be a Luddite). You’re ready to write. Right? Wait. Not so fast. Um, WHAT DO I WRITE ABOUT?
Perhaps a better question is: WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS? It’s called BRAINSTORMING and it can be fun. No, really. The secret to brainstorming is to let your imagination take over about 98% of your brain functions (leaving just enough for breathing and blinking). Try a few of these suggestions:
o Look out the window:
§ Pretend you’re on the other side of the window looking in/something suddenly crashes through the window/someone taps on the window/the window is really a porthole and the waves are rising/the window is in a spaceship and outside you see… You get the idea.
· Spread the Grammar Punk Constructing Writers™ Cards (or the K-3 Elementary Cards, the 4-9 Story Cards, 9-12 Idea Cards, or the GP Creative Cards) across a table. (See www.grammarpunk.com) Look at them very hard.
· Read. Something. Someone. Anyone. Read what and who you like.
· Observe, eavesdrop, listen, experience, daydream, speculate, question, doodle.
· Play with words, expressions, sayings, ideas, clichés, things on your desk . . .
· Write down any idea that pops into your head. Then the next and the next.
The writing ideas are in there, the challenge is to find that mysterious place where ideas hover, float, fidget, meander, wend, wiggle, gather, flitter, and live. And wait to be discovered. And pieced together in a gathering of words that will, with work, perseverance, and a bit of luck become story. A story. Your student’s story. Or even your own story.
To winnow out those free-floating, often elusive bits of flotsam that are ideas is easier—and harder—than you think. But like any hard-won skill, it takes practice, as does anything worth doing.
Because the ultimate goal of brainstorming is to formulate an idea that will grow and develop and hopefully resolve itself in the form of a story with a beginning, middle, and an end, it is helpful to at least attempt to tame the flurry of ideas that, once awakened, can bounce around your brain like a ping-pong ball in a wind tunnel. How to wake up those ideas? Ask them questions.
How?
What?
When?
Where?
Who?
Why?
How did the what happen when and where and to whom and WHY? Answer those questions and you have the beginning, possibly the middle, and even the end to story.
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