Why do you do NaNoWriMo? What benefits have you gotten from your participation?

It started out as a lark. Now I do it in part because it’s the only time of the year I have a consistent fictional writing practice and in part because of the joy I get in helping others rediscover their creative voice.

The realization that if it isn’t perfect out of the gate, that doesn’t mean it’s not a valid story or I’m a terrible writer and I should give up. It only means that I’m a human being. I’m also discovering that I’m becoming a better writer by tackling it over and over again without being attached to ‘making a living’ at it.

How did you keep yourself inspired and motivated during NaNoWriMo?

The first year it was pure dogged stubbornness. Since then, the forums, the write-ins, and the knowledge that I have anywhere between a hundred and three hundred people who ‘look up’ to me as one of the examples have helped.
From a less practical standpoint, bribery with everything from chocolate to evenings off to go to a concert if I make my word count has also worked. We’re big believers in my region in the power of gold stars and dime-store toys to motivate people.

What sort of planning, if any, are you doing this year before you start writing?

My story concept grew out of a conversation in May, so while I’m not a huge planner, I usually write a one page précis before I start, but I’ve never been a big outliner. I believe in coming up with a god hook and following the characters where they lead me.

What are some of the tools you use to keep yourself organized and on-track during NaNoWriMo? How do you use them?

Using the tools in the NaNoWriMo Hipster PDA (a derivative of the DIY Hipster PDA Creative Package; see www.diyplanner.com) helps me to keep things like eye color, hair color, and age straight. The 3x5 index cards are small enough to fit in the zipper pouch in my real planner, so they can come with me anywhere.

I also have been known to use the NaNoWriMo Report Card (see thread here:
http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/node/3004635) to keep track of where I am over the month and kick myself in the pants if I get behind.

How do you manage your time during NaNoWriMo to make time for writing?

Most of my family and friends know I check out of my social obligations during the month of November, so I tend to write in several short blocks of about fifteen to twenty minutes over the course of the day. I become very selective about what I do with my evenings, and thankfully most of my friends are very accommodating.

What advice do you have for other writers doing NaNoWriMo for the first time?

You’re going to write a certain amount of dreck. This is normal, even desirable, as writing, like sculpting, requires a certain degree of source material to be available for later carving. Don’t worry about being profound, profoundness comes in the editing process.

Just remember that at the end of the day, what defines a writer is that they write, not that they talk about it and decide they’ll never be good enough to be published, so if you get your butt in the chair every day, that’s half the battle.

Strangely enough, the more you write, the better you will get, which is why it doesn’t matter if sections are dreck.

Trust in the process, trust in the story, trust in the community. But most of all, trust yourself and give yourself permission to have fun with it.

Image by slack12 via Flickr

There comes a time in nearly every big writing project when you just can’t seem to move forward. Maybe you’ve written yourself into a corner and aren’t sure how to get out of it, maybe the end just seems too far away to be reachable, or maybe you burned through your initial enthusiasm and it just isn’t fun any more.

The difference between a writer and a dabbler is what you do at that point. A lot of folks will give up – pack up their manuscript and put it away, telling themselves they’ll pick it up again when their inspiration returns. Unfortunately, it rarely does. The real writers are the ones who push through these hard moments, doing whatever they have to do to overcome or bypass the thorny problems that keep them from reaching the end of their manuscript.

There are many strategies a writer can use to get up and over the hump. Try some of these ideas to help you deal with your own writing challenges and get your project done.

1. Change the scene.

Not in your story but in your life. Most writers are acclimated to particular environments where they feel comfortable – we literally get conditioned to associate where we write with the act of writing, like Pavlov’s dogs (if Pavlov had trained dogs to write books). But the mental processes that make our usual writing places conducive to writing can work against us when frustration strikes. Facing the same problem in the same place every day can put you deep in a rut that’s hard to escape without changing things up.

Something as simple as writing somewhere new can be just the change you need to trigger a breakthrough. Take your laptop to a different room, or outside, or to the library, or to a coffee house. Drive out of town with a notebook and box of pencils and write in the mountains, the desert, or the woods. Head to the beach or a friend’s house or a hotel – whatever it takes to break the association between where you write and what you’re writing – or anxiously not writing.

2. Switch mediums.

Just as changing where you write can help loosen up whatever’s blocking your way, changing your medium can help get the creativity flowing. Writing with a pen or pencil has a different feel — and involves different parts of the brain – than writing on a computer. Even switching to a different keyboard or word processor might throw some switch deep in the recesses of your unconscious mind to get the idea machine powered up again.

3. Skip a bit.

It’s easy to get caught up in the narrative flow of your work, trying to write straight through from beginning to end. But there’s no rule that says you have to write in the same order your finished product will be. In fact, often jumping forward in a piece can help solve difficult problems, since you get a more concrete idea of where you have to get to when you go back to fill in.

For example, I recently saw Neil Gaiman talking about his recent work The Graveyard Book. After years of trying – and failing – to write the book from the beginning, Gaiman finally decided to start in the middle, writing what would become chapter 4 first. Once he did that, he said, he knew how the story got there and where it had to go – the rest of the book just fell into place.

4. Go random.

This is a brainstorming trick that can help you write through a difficult patch. The idea is, when you’re stuck, find something totally random and force yourself to work it into the text. Open a dictionary and pick a word with your eyes closed, spin around in the middle of the room and point – it doesn’t matter how, just find something accidental to inject into your work.

The goal here is to change up the problem you’re working through, thus shifting the mental process away from whatever’s got you stuck. Instead of trying to figure out how your killer got into the locked room, you’re trying to figure out how to work the word “asparagus” into the scene – freeing up your mental “gears” to work on the first problem in the background. You might end up cutting the random bit later, but by then it will have served its purpose – and who knows, you might like that part, too!

5. Take a break.

It’s a strange thing about our brains – much of their best work is done when we’re not paying conscious attention. That’s one reason why so many ideas strike in the shower or while you’re driving – with your mind preoccupied by the matters at hand, the unconscious mind is free to work on the thorny problems that are keeping you up at night.

The tricks I’ve listed so far all try to shake things up so the unconscious can do its job, but in many cases, just stopping whatever you’re doing and working on something else can be enough. When frustration strikes, get up and take a walk, go for a drive (assuming you have a really, really fuel-efficient vehicle; in fact, why not take the horse-and-buggy instead?), watch a mindless sitcom, write a letter to your grandma, wash the dog, or – why not? – take a shower. Just make sure you have something to write on so you’re ready when inspiration comes a-knockin’.

6. Write crap.

Probably 90% of the writer’s block in the world comes from perfectionism, the insidious need to bring forth polished brilliance with every keystroke or jab of the pen.

Feh!

Look, you’re going to revise. I know it, you know it, William Zinsser knows it. You have to trust yourself enough to recognize crappy writing when you revise – and if you do that, then you can relax a little bit now and put some crappy writing down for your later revising self to catch.

So, if you can’t figure out the right way to say something, say it the wrong way. Give characters out-of-character dialogue. Write purple prose. Use 40 adverbs in every sentence. Just get down the general idea of what should be there and move on. If you feel uncomfortable about besmirching your otherwise perfect (NOT!) manuscript with such foulness, go ahead and highlight it or make the font color red so you know you’ll catch it on your next pass, but whatever you do, don’t stop writing until you figure it out – just write.

Sooner or later you’ll get through the rough patch and the ideas will start flowing again – and you won’t have to waste time rebuilding your momentum.

7. Read.

This is really a variation on “Take a break” above, but reading offers writers something different from other activities – it reminds us of what we wanted to do and be in the first place. Letting yourself be transported away by a favorite author’s words can help you find your own writerly self and return to the task you love. Better yet, read crap – I find there’s nothing quite so inspiring as the thought of how utterly awful some of the stuff that makes it into print, and even onto best-seller lists, is. Nothing like lowering the bar a little bit to give yourself the strength to tackle your own creative problems.

There’s an old saying that if someone asks you how your writing’s going and you haven’t written that day, you can’t answer “badly”. For the writing to go badly, you have to be writing. You can always fix up bad writing; you can’t fix up no writing. In the end, the best way to deal with the problems that threaten to keep you from writing is to just keep on writing, no matter how bad the lines that flow from your pen or across your screen end up being. Because that’s what writers do – we write.

Good luck.

Image by sirwiseowl via Flickr

In my series on collecting and organizing ideas, I discussed mind-mapping as a brainstorming tool. Mind-mapping is a kind of free-association method in which ideas are generated by association with a central idea, and then each of the generated ideas in turn becomes a source of inspiration for further brainstorming. Mind-mapping is an interesting blend of right-brain creative exploration and left-brain order-making – although the graphic format and unboundedness of mind-mapping allows for unfettered ideation, the linking of ideas creates a self-organized final product. In fact, most mind-mapping software includes an option to export the seemingly unstructured “blob” of thought that appears on the screen into a neatly-formatted traditional outline, complete with Roman numerals and sub-headings.

Chuck Frey emailed me in response to my mention of mind-mapping to tell me about a post he’d just written on the future of mind-mapping software. His blog is “The MindMapping Software Blog, so we can probably assume that Chuck has spent more than a few minutes thinking about the subject.

According to Frey, mind-mapping software is still barely out of its infancy, and we can expect to see some interesting developments ahead as programmers develop software that allows us not only to visualize the connections between ideas in our heads, but the connections between those ideas and the vast wealth of data on the Web. “The mind map needs to become more of a ‘knowledge hub’,” he writes, “where information can be gathered, manipulated and analyzed.”

Returning to the present, one of the premier mind-mapping applications out there today is iMindMap, the only mind-mapping software officially endorsed by Tony Buzan, the main figure responsible for developing and popularizing mind-mapping. The developers of iMindMap have taken great pains to make the experience of creating mind-maps on the computer as close as possible to the experience of drawing them with pencil and paper. In addition to brainstorming, iMindMap supports a wide range of planning activities, and integrates well with both MS Office and OpenOffice.

iMindMap’s Ultimate version retails for $295 USD, putting it well out of the reach for many writers (including yours truly). But Emily Van Keogh of Buzan Online has offered to give away one free copy of the Ultimate edition to one of my readers.

Which means I get to have a contest!

Now, I could make it easy on you and ask you to send me an email and pick one at random, or something like that, but I want to get into the spirit of the thing. So to enter, I’m going to ask you to answer that oldest of questions posed to writers:

Where do you get your ideas?

You can enter in one of two ways. First, you can leave a comment on this post with your answer. The other way is to write a post of your own, in any public forum you have access too – your own website, LiveJournal, even Twitter if you’re that concise – and put a link to your post in the comments on this post. Just make sure that anyone can read your answer, wherever you decide to post it. (I’d appreciate a link back to the contest, too, but it’s not a requirement.)

Enter by the end of October – that’s the 31st of October for the calendrically-challenged – and I’ll randomly select one entry as a winner. Buzan Online will supply a download link and registration code. Make sure you include your email address in your comment so I can contact you if you’re the winner!

I’m looking forward to seeing your answers to this totally clichéd question. Let’s try to be creative and informative – maybe we can come up with the perfect answer and then nobody will have to ask it any more! And feel free to spread the word – the more the merrier!

Image by ecstaticist via Flickr

The hardest part of any project for me is getting my notes and captured thoughts into some sort of usable format. That’s one of the reasons why I like conputerized note-taking systems like Evernote so much – it organizes for me by creating notebooks and allowing me to tag each entry.

But Evernote is only one of many different tools out there for organizing your thoughts. Each tool offers one or more of several key strategies for organizing ideas, so I thought I’d start this last section in this series by outlining some of the main strategies or paradigms for getting your thoughts organized in a useable form.

Strategies for Organizing Ideas

There are several different ways to organize your notes and inspirations for later recall. The ultimate goal is to be able to pull up the ideas you recorded earlier, whenever you need them and with as little effort as possible. This means imposing some sort of order on your material that makes sense to you – unfortunately, there is no single set of “best practices” that’s going to work for everyone. Here are a handful of strategies that might work for you.

1. Chronological

The simplest way to organize ideas – or anything else that occurs at various moments over time – is chronologically. You can keep an index card in your pocket, record any thoughts that come to you over the course of the day, jot a date in the corner, and drop it into an index card file at the end of the day before starting a new card. Or you could keep an idea journal, putting ideas down from front to back. Or even keep a single word processor file and add each thought to the bottom as it occurs to you.

The drawback to this kind of organization is that you have to remember when an idea occurred to you in order to find it again. Which isn’t very useful unless you have a mind like a steel trap (as they say) and a memory that goes back with some precision over several years. On the flip side, flipping through your ideas can be an inspiring activity in and of itself, and working chronologically does have the benefit of allowing you to see your ideas progress over time.

2. Project-based

If you work a lot on discrete projects, you might keep a file or folder for each project and add each idea to the appropriate place as needed. For example, you might write each new thought on an index card and, upon returning to your desk, drop each card into its respective folder. Or you could start an EverNote notebook for each project and clip notes to that notebook. This has the benefit of keeping everything you need to work on a particular project at your fingertips when you need it most, and out of the way when you don’t. On the other hand, it doesn’t help with ideas that don’t clearly belong to an active or past project, nor with ideas that might be useful in more than one context.

3. Tagging

Tagging is the newest thing in taxonomy, and if you use any modern blogging software, photo sharing site, or social media service, you’ve run across it. With tagging, you can assign a set of descriptive keywords to an item, allowing you to find it by browsing through any of the tags associated with it. Tagging eliminates the need to place individual copies of a document in several different folders – the same document can be found through any of the tags you’ve given it.

Several applications use tagging, but for the most part, tagging hasn’t quite hit its stride yet. It’s still difficult, for instance, to tag files on your computer’s file system (though see below for one solution), and no adequate system of scanning files and automatically tagging them has been developed yet. On the other hand, if you stay on the ball, you can produce a very useful set of tags, assigning everything you produce to its relevant project(s) and a set of descriptive terms that you are likely to remember.

4. Freeform

With search technology becoming more and more robust, some people have foregone organizing their thoughts altogether, depending on the ability of tools like Google Desktop to find whatever they’re looking for quicker than they could themselves. There  are tools that bring this approach to note organization as well, allowing you to dump everything into one central repository and pull out of it what you need using search or visualization techniques. For example, personal wiki software allows you to keep notes and add links on the fly using special formats like CamelCase (phrases squished together with each word capitalized to distinguish it from the words before, as in “CamelCase”) – and some newer wikis will find links between entries automatically.

Some applications for organizing your thoughts while writing

askSam: askSam has been around for years, and is the original freeform database. You can dump just about anything into askSam – including imported documents – and organize it easily in ways that make sense to you. askSam will locate links between various pieces of text and help you find exactly what you’re looking for. And it’s designed to be easy to use for non-technical users. At $150 for the basic version and almost $400 for the Pro version, it’s not cheap, but so many writers swear by askSam that I had to include it here.

The Literary Machine: A free program that whose author calls it a “document compiler”, the Literary Machine is a strange beast that some writers rave about and others loathe with all their hearts. The general idea is that you can dump ideas in and then pull them up and string them together into a final document. It’s not particularly intuitive, so I might be missing great gobs of functionality hidden under the hood; if the LM’s oddness clicks with your own particular brain quirks, you might find it an amazing extension of your thought processes. Otherwise, like me, you’ll pr’y be baffled.

Liquid Story Binder/yWriter 4/Scrivener/Story Mill: These novel-writing apps allow you to organize your ideas by project, with character sheets, setting forms, images, sounds,notes, and all manner of other information. They also feature built-in document editing, so that you work in a wholly self-contained workspace with everything you need a mouse-click or two away. I’ve written about Liquid Story Binder and yWriter on this site; Scrivener and (Story Mill (formerly “Avenir”) are Mac-only and I haven’t used them, but many writers claim they are worth switching to Mac for! yWriter is free; the rest are all commercial software.

TiddlyWiki: TiddlyWiki is designed to be a personal wiki, allowing you to store, search link, and easily update your thoughts, notes, and ideas. The system is a self-contained web page that can open in any modern browser, from any storage medium (which means you can easily run it from a thumb drive, external hard drive, even an mp3 player if it will mount as an external drive on your system). TiddlyWiki is free and very customizable, with themes and plugins such as those at TiddlyTools.

Tag Everything (formerly “Files, Folders, and Tags”): Tag Everything allows you to add tags to files and folders directly in the Windows file system, which means you can easily associate one file with several different projects. It’s not free, but at $30 it’s not terribly expensive, either, and if taging “clicks” with how yur brain works, it’s the only way at the moment to bring tags to your Windows files.

Of course, there are hundreds of other tools that can help you organize your thoughts. I’ve tried here to mention a few of the more representative ones, but I’m interested to hear your thoughts – what software, if any, helps you get your thoughts organized when you write? How do you keep track of all the odd ideas that occur to you throughout the day – once they’re recorded, then what? Let me, and the other readers, know about your system in the comments!

Image via Wikipedia

Ideas are paradoxical. While hours of urgent deep thought might leave us without a clue, at other times ideas seem to pop into our heads effortlessly, dazzling us with their perfection. Alas, these brilliant moments of inspiration come all too often when we’re busy doing other things — driving, showering, drifting off to sleep, or waiting on line at the bank.

In fact, because our unconscious mind continues to mull things over even when our conscious minds are on other things — especially when our conscious minds are on other things! — is it most likely that our best ideas will come when we’re least prepared. A good part of your job as a writer, then, consists in being prepared for those moments when you’re least prepared.

Ubiquitous capture is the name of the game here — being always ready to grab hold of and record for later use any idea that crosses your mind, when it crosses your mind. Since inspiration might strike in any number of different situations, you’re probably going to want to have several different means of capturing ideas in your writer’s toolkit to assure that, when the moment comes, you’re not left without any means of capturing it for later.

My preferred means of capture is pen-and=paper, and I’m rarely without a pocketful of pens (and my pants all have the ink stains to prove it!) and a notebook in my back pocket. This serves my needs about 80% of the time; the other 20%, when my hands or attention are needed for things like driving, or when my inspiration comes from something I’m reading or looking at on my computer, I rely on somewhat more high-tech tools.

Good old-fashioned pen and paper

Nothing beats the feel of a comfortable pen laying good ink across a smooth page. There’s something almost magical about watching words spin out under your fingertips — so magical that just the act of picking up a pen can inspire us with new ideas.

While a tattered 69-cent spiral-bound notebook can hold your ideas just as well as anything else, a lot of writers (among others) are discovering the joys of writing on high-quality pocket notebooks like the Moleskine. With a rigid cover, elastic strap closure, and creamy paper available in lined, gridded, and blank styles, Moleskines and the wave of copycat notebooks that have followed in the wake of Moleskine’s success offer something more than just a place to write — they offer, if you’ll forgive the expression, a “writing experience”.

Of course, this is fostered in part by Moleskine’s own marketing; each Moleskine comes with an insert explaining the Moleskine story, how artists like Van Gogh and Picasso sketched in Moleskines in French sidewalk cafés, how Hemingway carried one to capture his thoughts, and so on. Of course, it’s codswallop; they used notebooks, of course, but what brand and what style, nobody knows for sure.

What we do know is that Moleskine’s are sturdy and feel good to write in. The paper is just the right thickness to prevent even very liquid inks from bleeding through much, the barely off-white color of the pages is easy on the eyes, and the sturdy binding makes it easy to work in your lap, on the grass, or in your hand just about everywhere. Plus, they hold up well to being tossed around in your purse or backpack, or even to the rigors of back-pocket travel.

They’re pricey: around $11.00 for the pocket-sized notebooks, and they’re never on sale (not that I’ve seen, anyway). You can pick one up at most Borders and Barnes & Noble stores (look up front, near the register) or order them online. $11.00 seems like a lot for a notebook, but trust me, they’re worth it. Still, there are alternatives. Both Target and Wal-Mart sell leather-bound pocket notebooks for $7 or $8 that are clearly inspired by the Moleskine — the same rounded corners, off-white pages, elastic strap, even the signature pocket inside the back cover.

Another alternative are the hard-bound notebooks Office Depot sells under it’s store brand, Foray. Available in letter size, 6′ x 8″, and pocket-sized, these are a bit of a departure from the Moleskine model. The covers are paper-bound and square-cornered, and there’s no elastic strap to keep it closed (on looking, I see they do have an elastic strap). What they do have that’s nice is a cluster of project planning pages at the front, which are great for to-do lists and brainstorming. I use a larger one for each of the projects I work on.

For an even less expensive and lower-tech solution, there’s always index cards. Index cards are cheap, easily available, highly portable, and can be printed on in most printers. One creative index card solution is the Hipster PDA, a fancy tongue-in-cheek name for a stack of index cards bound with a binder clip. A simple idea, but very engaging –Google hipster pda and see all the variations people have come up with to customize this simple idea to their own lifestyles.

One brilliant way to get the most out of index cards is to print on them. D*I*Y Planner has adapted their whole set of free downloadable planner pages to print on 3x5 index cards, including calendars, checklists, address pages, and more. For writers, there are project planners, storyboards, character profiles, story idea forms, and more — you can easily craft a full-featured writing support kit from the available templates. In addition to the core set there are also user-created add-ons and a widget kit so you can create your own.

Idea capture on the computer

What do you do, though, if you can’t pull out a pad of paper and hand-write some notes? Or what if you’re already working at the computer where your notes will eventually end up anyway?

There are tons of programs and services for capturing and storing information from your PC or mobile device. Some allow you to save “clips” of websites and other documents, others allow you to text message notes, and some even allow you to phone in your thoughts, transcribing them into text and forwarding them to wherever you want. Setting up the perfect solution for you might take some trial and error, and any system will take some time to get used to before you trust it enough to start using it as an “outboard brain”, storing whatever crosses your mind and knowing that it will be there later when you’re ready to use it.

Some of the services and software I’ve used include:

• Google Notebook: Google notebook offers a simple, no-frills online notebook that you an type notes into directly or add to using a Firefox extension that adds a “Note this” entry to your right-click menu, allowing you to save either whole pages or selected text on the fly. You can create several notebooks, and sections within each notebook, to keep your thoughts organized; unfortunately, the “Note this” extension always saves to the last opened notebook by default. If you want, you can share your notes privately by sending a special link to your collaborators, or publicly by generating a publicly-available web page.
• del.icio.us: Billed as a social bookmarking service, del.icio.us (now known as “delicious.com”, but I’m old-school!) allows you to bookmark sites, add notes and tags, and search or browse through them easily. Like Google Notebook, they also offer a Firefox extension that places a button in your toolbar — see something you like, click the button, and add notes and tags in the pop-up window. This is great for web research, as you can store all the links to material you’ve come across on the web. Since you can also surf other people’s bookmarks by tags, or search the site, it’s also a good way to find new material you might have otherwise missed.
• Various sidebar programs: There are several sidebar programs that place widgets along the right-hand edge of your screen, and all of them have at least one note-taking widget. If you have a Vista computer, Vista Sidebar is built-in; other solutions include the sidebar included with Google Desktop and Yahoo!‘s Konfabulator. As you work, jot your notes into the note-taking widget and go back to the task at hand knowing your idea will be waiting for you when you’re ready.
• Jott: Jott is a voice transcription service you access via any phone whose number you’ve registered with the service. You call Jott (I have it set as a spee-dial number) and leave a voice message; a few minutes later, it’s sent back to you, or to whomever you request, as a text message. The transcription is pretty good, too! The best thing about Jott is that it integrates with tons of other services — you can send to Twitter, post tasks to online to-do lists, even blog with the service. And although they aren’t “official” services, I’ve figured out how to create documents on Google Docs and add notes to Evernote (described below) — see my instructions in this Lifehack post.
• Twitter: Twitter is best known for its socializing function, but you can easily set up a Twitter account to act as an idea repository — one you can add to using the web interface or by sending text messages from your phone. You can even send Tweets from some IM programs and desktop clients like Twhirl and Tweetdeck, or using Jott (see above).
• Evernote: I’ve saved the best for last. Evernote is a powerful note-taking program that exists as both a desktop client and an online service (there’s a Windows Mobile app, and one for iPhone, too, but I’ve never used them). Like Google Notebook, you can add a Firefox extension to save clips from the Web, but you can also use the included Evernote Clipper to add selections from any program on your desktop. And, of course, you can type notes in directly, organize your notes into notebooks, tag them, and so on. Once a note is in Evernote, it’s synched to the online service, so it’s available from anywhere. What’s more, any images are scanned for text which is included in Evernote’s search function (though the text itself isn’t available to users — yet?). It even works pretty well with handwriting! Evernote also allows you to add whole files in PDF format, making it a pretty handy place to store research material, although so far PDFs are only fully indexed (and thus searchable) on the Mac.

There are plenty of other programs, services, and strategies out there for capturing ideas — I’ve only just scratched the surface here. What are some of the ways you capture ideas for later use?

Image via Wikipedia

While coming up with ideas might be easy, coming up with good ones is a bit harder. You increase your odds, of course, by coming up with lots and lots of ideas — out of a hundred or so, surely there ought to be one or two you can do something with!

Brainstorming is an effective way of coming up with tons of ideas. The idea is simple: just sit down, clear your head, and start writing down anything that comes to mind. Let your mind wander, and your pencil follow.

Of course, you don’t need fancy technology to brainstorm effectively — a pen or pencil and a piece of paper will do — but if you work at the computer a lot, it might be suitable to brainstorm in the same medium you write in. For simple brainstorming, an open word processor document will do.

Brainstorming, though, is rarely so simple. Many people find that a bit of structure is helpful — limitations often spark the greatest creativity, after all. Here are a few kinds of brainstorming exercises, some that can benefit from technological tools and some that can’t, that might be useful.

Forced Association

Jurgen Wolff told me about this on Lifehack Live. The idea is, write down a list of random words or phrases — maybe the first word on the first 10 pages of a book, or random words found flipping through a dictionary, or ten things on your desk, or whatever. Then force yourself to come up with one idea for each of them. Say you’re a fantasy writer, and somehow you’ve come up with “orange, computer, pen…” (for illustration purposes, I’ll just use three words).

• Orange: Yurok the Viking is surprised to discover an orange amid the frozen wastelands of the North.
• Computer: What would a computer look like in a fantasy setting? What would it do? Phineas the Magician sets out to create a magical machine to track the stars.
• Pen: A magical pen that, when used, creates the reality that’s written.

Are those great ideas? Maybe not — but they’re ideas. As you come up with more and more, you start to surprise yourself — your brain loosens up and starts really speculating. Which is great if you’re a speculative fiction writer, right?

Mind-mapping

Mind-mapping is a visual brainstorming technique in which a central theme is written in the middle of a page and random associations are “branched” off in connected circles. Check out Tony Buzan’s mind-mapping page for examples of how you can work with mind-maps and what you can do with them. Because mind-mapping is spatial instead of linear, they are supposed to allow your brain’s more creative side more free rein.

Although many mind-mappers find the physicality of pen or pencil on paper inspiring, others are just as comfortable working on a keyboard. What you may give up in physical intimacy with your medium is, for many, more than compensated for by the ability to easily save, search, and share their mind-maps. There are dozens of tools, some desktop-based and some accessed via the web, to make creating and storing digital mind-maps a breeze. Some free programs and services include:

• FreeMind: FreeMind is a free, open-source program for your Mac, Linux, or Windows PC (you do need Java installed, however). Its powerful mind-mapping engine is quite simple to work with, and while the mind-maps you create with FreeMind won’t necessarily be the most beautiful in the world, they are functional.
• bubbl.us: bubbl.us is a free service that allows you to create very slick, attractive mind-maps online. You can work by yourself, or easily collaborate with others using the simple sharing features. The whole system is very visual — ideas can be color-coded, bubbles can be dragged around the screen, and emerging connections between ideas can be drawn in.
• Mindomo: Like bubbl.us, Mindomo is a web-based service, but geared somewhat more towards a professional audience — its mind-maps are less artsy and “chunky” than bubbl.us’. They are also much more flexible, with an interface that looks very much like Word 2007’s Ribbon Bar allowing you the ability to fine-tune shapes, fonts, colors, and much else.

Writing prompts

A writing prompt is an assignment, something you’re given to write about. “Write a 200-word essay on ‘What I did this summer’.” Some writers use these as warm-up exercises, to get into the rhythm of writing; others try to create original works around prompts.

There are several sources of free writing prompts online — some are just lists of topics, some post a new one every week, some will let you sign up to have one delivered by email at regular intervals (daily, weekly, etc.). Here’s a few:

• Language is a virus: Random prompt generator. Sample:Write as you think, as close as you can come to this, that is, put pen to paper and don’t stop. Experiment writing fast and writing slow.
• Prompt Generator: Another random prompt generator. Sample: “A home in the community has burned. Tell how you would help the family recover from the loss.”
• Creative Writing Prompts: Over three hundred prompts; mouse over them to see the prompt pop up. Sample: Write about a good thing gone bad.
• Writer’s Digest: A new prompt is on their homepage every week. This is the archive of past prompts. Sample:Babies typically talk in babbles that adults can’t understand. But one day, while at the park, you’re sitting on a bench next to two babies. They start their babbling, when all of a sudden you realize you can understand them. Even more, they are plotting a nefarious plan. Write this scene.
• Can Teach: A long list of questions to answer. Sample: What is a good neighbor?

Don’t be put off by the fact that some of these are intended for schoolchildren. The idea is to get some random thought to spark your imagination. And they can be equally as profound as the ones for professional writers — after all, Robert Frost wrote a not-too-shabby poem on the topic of “What is a good neighbor?”

Oblique Strategies

Created by artsy musician Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies is a set of cards. When you’re stuck, you pick one and do whatever it says.

Several online versions of Oblique Strategies exist, such as David Ray’s Oblique Strategies webpage. Click “Random Card” and something random comes up, like “Mechanicalize something idiosyncratic”. What does it mean? I don’t know — maybe your trusty hero has a machine that allows his mother’s voice to whisper in his ear? Maybe there’s a mechanic that fixes broken hearts — or breaks healed ones? It’s oblique, that’s the point!

Image via Wikipedia

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” poet Robert Herrick advised his readers — for all too soon, you’ll be old and rosebud-gathering will be just one of many things you are no longer capable of.

That’s the normal reading of the poem, but it occurs to me that it is in the very nature of rosebuds themselves to disappear — you have but a brief instant to pick them before they open into flowers, the rosebud gone forever.

For the writer, ideas are rosebuds — brief, fleeting thoughts that flit across our minds and then, if not captured in just that instant, disappear forever. Since those ideas are the stock in trade of a writer, catching them in that quick instant is essential. Unlike the flower-picker, though, writers’ rosebuds are not found only in the garden — they can be spotted at any time, requiring us to remain always alert and ready to pounce with our metaphorical shears.

There are a number of tools a writer can use to make sure s/he records as many ideas as s/he can — and great tools, also, for keeping track of them and calling them up when we need them. These tools range from decidedly low-tech pen-and-paper solutions to advanced freeform databases. In this series, I’ll offer a set of tools you can use in various contexts to capture ideas as they occur, and another set of tools to manage and reclaim them.

First, though, we need to think a little bit about process. Tying all these parts together requires work — not a lot of work, and not hard work, but work nonetheless. Ideally, it becomes part of your routine, a set of habits that occur automatically when triggered by a new idea.

There are four phases to idea collecting:

1. Generate: We don’t have to wait until ideas come to us — in fact, doing so can doom us as writers! Give yourself time to let your mind do what it’s best at: come up with new ideas.
2. Capture: Get ideas down wherever they occur to you..
3. Process: Transfer ideas into a central “repository” to keep them safe and available.
4. Organize and Evaluate: Review your system to pull out ideas worth pursuing right now.

As you look at the tools in the next few posts, think about how you can use them as part of an overall system. Each “phase” (except “Process”) will have its own post, with tools and tips for generating, capturing, and organizing ideas. Processing isn’t done with a tool, it’s done with time — sitting down and copying everything into your central system. Ideally, you’ll do this once a week or so — the point isn’t to figure out what’s good or bad, but just to handle the basic “bookkeeping” of transferring words from one medium to another.