Find New Ideas for Writing!
A new idea is the start of any book, essay, article, actually for anything you want to write. Here are three easy-to-apply tips on how to generate new ideas!
Before you do anything, get a blank paper ready or select a mind-mapping software of your choosing. This Creative Paper is going to be the most important document in this phase of your writing process.
Three ways to come up with new ideas for your next writing project:
First, if you know the general topic already because it is something that you think about a lot or because the topic was assigned to you or you are particularly passionate about it, then you have a good starting point. Write this general topic in the middle of your Creative Paper and start to do some research.
Read the Wikipedia article and watch some videos on YouTube to get a broad overview and some inspiration. While you do that, write down all the ideas that come to your mind. This does not have to be structured or clustered in any way. Don’t just watch videos and read random sites on google, do this with the purpose of finding an idea for you. Write your general topic in the middle of the paper and write the ideas and interesting points you come across anywhere on the document. You can write single words or a whole paragraph on your creative paper. This is totally up to you. Just get the ideas flowing! As you write the ideas down you create new space for more creativity in your brain, so always get ideas out of your brain and on paper!
Second, if you still have no idea or there is not even a broad topic that was assigned to you, then you have to come up with ideas yourself. Let’s say you want to start your blog or write an essay, what are the topics you could write about?
In this case, I would suggest one particular technique that you can use to generate ideas, the Free-Writing-Technique. This is super easy and inspiring. Look, you take a paper or open a document and set a timer for 5 minutes. Write on top of your topic a writing prompt. Something like “What inspires me is …”, or “I love to do/ talk about …” or “I am curious about …” or “I have already written before about …” or “Recently I’ve read about…” or “Recently I’ve laughed about…”. Now get your pen swinging and don’t stop writing for the next 5 minutes. Don’t stop to think, just put everything down. When other thoughts cross your mind and remind you that have to buy some milk or bread: write it down. When you run out of ideas then write “Ehm, Ehm, Ehm, I don’t know what to write” until you get new ideas. The most important thing is to write for 5 minutes continuously!
After the time is over, go over the text with a highlighter, and highlight all ideas that you could use. Then write them all on your Creative Paper (we’ve already agreed that this is the first thing you want to have ready). Then start to connect related ideas to each other. Now you start having a couple of clusters of related ideas. If they are still too vague, google or youtube some (maximum three) of them to get more substance into these clusters. Now you should be able to pick one of them that you want to focus on. Remember, you could potentially write articles on all your ideas, but you can only process one idea at a time. So pick one and run with it.
Third, if the second step did not help you to come up with ideas, I still have one idea for you. Do something else! We always tend to not find something when we are looking for it. We all know what happens when we need to find this one file or this one specific book that we used some time ago: we don’t find it. But then, randomly when we are looking for something else we incidentally stumble over this one thing we were looking for. Let’s apply this here as well. Go out, meet some friends or family. Talk to them about god and the world and also mention that you try to come up with some ideas for your next writing project, maybe they can help you. Get some inspiration from your favourite movie or book, go for a run, try to solve some riddles. After that, repeat steps one and two again. Good luck!
