Brainstorming for Non-fiction Writing

Effective brainstorming can be the difference between successful writing and not writing at all! This creative skill can get aspiring writers up and running

Have you ever wondered why despite your extensive knowledge of topics and themes, work experience and general intelligence, you still struggle to get an article, essay or non-fiction book up and running? Of all the possible reasons, ineffective brainstorming may be one. Brainstorming is in essence, creative, dynamic reflection. The quality of your brainstorming is important, and may be affected by the quality of your reflective intelligence. But don’t worry, reflective intelligence can be enhanced and honed, and for the aspiring writer, brainstorming can serve the role of identifying topics, identifying sub-topics, and extrapolating pre-existing ideas.

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Perhaps you have been successful writing in high school or university. I know people who can write brilliant university essays and research papers. Ironically, this doesn’t guarantee that they can write autonomously. Some people flourish when the essay structure is scaffolded by a set of guidelines and recommendations, only to find that when the scaffolding has been removed, they don’t have the creative reflection skills necessary to tap into their experience base and create a writing structure from scratch. The good news here, if you find yourself in this category, is that as the skill of writing has usually proven itself to exist, once your brainstorming technique has improved, and working titles start rolling in thick and fast, everything takes care of itself. Sometimes all that’s required is to unlock the barriers to creative brainstorming.

Three-step process

Step 1

Effective brainstorming begins essentially with self-confidence, common sense, and an environment that is judgement-free, to allow for your creative juices to flow without being interrupted by thoughts such as “this idea sucks”, or “so many people have written about this already”. Consider all the things that can be called upon to fuel this initial stage. Your brainstorming can be based, amongst many things, on:

• personal observations
• the observations of others
• experiences
• thoughts
• philosophies and ideologies
• work experience
• studies
• areas of knowledge and extensive research/reading

Remember, you are trying to tap into the wealth and treasures of your life experiences, and to fuse that with your database of acquired knowledge and your own reflections, thoughts and philosophies. The possibilities are boundless.

Step 2

This is where the rubber really meets the road, and a process of refinement begins. In this second stage, the brainstorming technique matures into a state of creative reflection that now requires a fusion of past, present and future. It is here that the individual essentially blends life experience with a sense of perspicacity to create great writing ideas and to anticipate the needs of a potential target audience. It also creates the basic direction for any research or referencing you will need to undertake. As challenging as this may sound, this stage in essence, shifts from words and phrases, to statements, propositions and theses. One of the most common methods employed to do this is called “key question creation”.

Whether your initial brainstorming resulted in single words and phrases, or statements and theses, each of these ideas is essentially a scratching of the surface. For each idea, try writing down no less than five key questions, examining different aspects of the key topic. And don’t worry, key questions can be as simple as basic when, where, and why type questions, through to more complex ones (see example of a brainstorming session below). I recommend aiming for about ten key questions. What starts off as one brainstormed idea can often result in a variety of topics. Even better, the key questions, given their shared connection to the originally brainstormed idea, may even form a structure of investigations that can be converted into a series of related articles! Should you find that you struggle in this second stage, don’t panic. It is often possible to get a feel for key questions on the internet by simply typing a search for “key questions about” plus your topic of investigation.

Step 3

Finally, once your basic initial brainstorming has matured into a full idea and a series of key questions and or sub-topics, you are now ready to brainstorm the more pragmatic aspects of your idea. This is important, as it is in this stage that you make any final decisions about whether or not to follow through with the topic, or any adjustments required before publishing. This stage also differs in two key ways from the first two steps. Firstly, it is less reflective (initially) and can follow a more established set of “guided” brainstorming questions. Second, any thoughts you come up with will require some follow-up research, such as identifying web search trends and assessing ideas for current marketplace saturation. Some of the common guided brainstorming questions for this final stage include:

1. What contribution might the writing make to the topic area? Will it solve problems, address underdeveloped and/or infrequently published aspects of the topic, or put a unique twist on an already popular topic?
2. Should the writing be didactic (designed to teach), uplifting, reflective, or a combination of purposes?
3. What might the audience be? Do you want to write for a niche audience, or do you want to reach a wider audience?
4. In what ways might the writing be interesting, challenging, and supportive for the audience?
5. Is it feasible, in regards the amount of time you can devote to the topic? Does it require more expertise than you can sincerely represent?
6. How might other writers have contributed to this topic?

A three-step brainstorming example

Ok, so lets put all this into practice. Imagine you are a post-graduate university student who studied accounting, but also completed a couple of elective sociology subjects on the side, and worked a few years part-time for a department store. Step one of your brainstorming results in your wanting to further investigate the following topics:

shopping trends, the sociology of adolescent female shoppers, changes in retail habits between your generation and previous ones, fashion

You finally decide on “the sociology of adolescent female shoppers”. Now you move onto step two, and the creation of key questions. Out of approximately nine or ten, you decide on a few you sincerely think you could work with, for example:

1. In what ways are adolescent female shoppers different from female shoppers in general?

2. Are adolescent female shoppers conscientious of how they shop, or do peer and social influences do most of the thinking for them?

3. In what ways do advertisers and marketing firms target adolescent female shoppers?

Finally, after researching these questions, and the pragmatic guided questions of step three, you decide that you are going to write a didactic article on the following:

• Identity and the peer-pressured world of adolescent female shoppers

The brainstorming for this idea, when I followed the three steps, took approximately ten minutes!