5 Useful Prewriting Techniques to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing

They are also highly pivotal for breaking your writer’s block

Photo by Jodie Cook on Unsplash

Do you want to write inspiring stories without a break?

Writing regularly drains one’s depot of ideas. It results in mental exhaustion too. One cannot generate new ideas constantly, as it consumes too much mental energy.

But you can make it fun as I do. I use these techniques most often. When I am doing anything, I write freely. It gives me freedom and pleasure to write without a single thought of writing.

I use these techniques to grease my writing tools. They can also help you avoid getting stuck in the middle of nowhere when you are writing.

Turing a blank page blue needs a constant source of inspiration which many writers lack. This is a natural process, and every writer gets through it. It is called writer’s block in the universe of writers.

But there are highly effective ways to reinvigorate your dying art by following a few simple techniques. These techniques can save you from complete disappointment in writing. They guard you against writer’s block perpetually and sharpen your craft of writing.

There are multiple writing techniques various prominent writers use and recommend, but thanks to the University Of Kansas Writing Center, which has devised the basic five practical prewriting techniques that help break writer’s block and improve one’s writing skills by generating and clarifying new ideas.

1. Listing or brainstorming technique

Listing or brainstorming is a mental tool for idea generation on any topic within a short span. Listing helps you collect all the related ideas about your topic quickly from your mind. It focuses your mind on one issue when you run your horses to generate associated ideas. You generate broader ideas about the subject through the listing process, which you can narrow down by omitting the irrelevant and keeping the most relevant ideas.

Here is how to use it:

• Select a topic and think about the relevant ideas and terms that may add more to the case. But don’t censor your thought. Let your thought wander around freely. Free your mind from your mind.
• Jot down everything that hits your mind. Don’t wait or remove. Write all the possibilities without editing or omitting anything.
• Now, once you have exhausted your idea-generating process, organize all the ideas as you deem fit. Please give it a sequence and arrange the ideas according to the priority and thematically relation.
• Now, narrow down your topic by removing the far-irrelevant things. Next, omit everything that doesn’t support your core topic thematically, and you think they could lead to diversion.
• Now, write a topic sentence or thesis statement that may help you write your essay or story.

2. Clustering technique

The clustering technique is also called mind mapping and ideas mapping. It is a process through which you provide connections to your ideas. You visualize how every idea relates to every other before writing on it.

Clustering provides a visual picture of your ideas and shows where your topic is leading. It is the best way to determine to draw a relation between ideas.

Once you have exhausted your ideas and jotted them down on paper in a cluster of circles, you can give them numbers according to their importance. You can also easily omit any concept that doesn’t form a relevant relation by crossing that circle.

Here is how to use it:

• Write the subject/topic at the center of the page. You can underline or encircle it.
• During the idea-generating process, write related ideas to the main subject/topic, and link every new concept to the primary topic in the circle.
• Add new ideas to smaller circles if they need more explanations or deal with a diverse point of view.

3. Freewriting technique

I used the Freewriting technique for discovering and developing my topic. You can also do that.

It helps you clarify a specific idea that is hazy in your mind. You write about it non-stop without thinking or editing it. You write whatever comes to your mind on the spur of the moment. This process increases your focus and mitigates distractions. Once in the freewriting process, you suspend your conscious mind, allowing your subconscious to engage more freely with ideas.

Here is how to use it:

• For example, you have an idea, but you can’t write about it clearly, or you are unsure what form it will take. The freewriting technique helps in this situation. All you have to do is to write whatever comes to your mind without a stop. Keep writing for 10 to 15 minutes even if you have to write “nothing comes to mind” multiple times but write. By doing so, you would write many ideas or clarify your concept.
• While in the process, don’t stop, think, edit, or correct. It doesn’t matter your write grammatically incorrect or wrong spellings. Don’t stop, even if you have to start every new idea after a few words.
• Once you finish your freewriting session, check back what you have written. Now, encircle or underline the relevant, prominent, and exciting ideas. Arrange those ideas as you see fit.
• Now, rewrite the relevant ideas with intensity and narrow down your topic. During the rewrite, don’t let your mind wander extensively off the subject and focus only on the topic. During this time, you will add more relevant ideas as the matter is now narrowed.

4. Looping technique

The looping technique is much similar to freewriting. The only difference is that after the freewriting session, which was extensive and not specific to the topic, the loop writing is precise.

In loop writing, you write on the idea or topic you discovered during the first freewriting session. You write on that topic for another 5–10 minutes without stopping, editing, or correcting like freewriting. But one different thing is that you stick to the topic deliberately.

Looping is not onetime writing. You can do it as many times as you wish or until you have discovered what you really want. After first looping, encircle the exciting ideas, topics, words, phrases, etc., and cross the irrelevant ones. Take a new subject or idea and expand it. Or you can write on various aspects of one central idea if that interests you.

This will help you reach your topic more systematically, and it will organize your ideas clearly.

Here is how to use it:

• Please select the best idea from the first freewriting draft and develop it.
• Try to focus on only that idea, but not too strictly.
• Write about the topic without thinking, editing, or correcting.
• After the first looping draft, please read it and choose another topic from your written ideas. Discover more ideas and write on them.
• Revise the process a few times or until you are clear about what you want to write.
• Write on various aspects of the topic in different drafts. Don’t write two parts of one subject in one draft. Focus on one side.
• After a few tries, you will surely be clear about your topic.

5. The Journalists’ Questions technique

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”― Richard Feynman

The Journalists’ Questions Technique is the most exciting and mind-opening technique in the prewriting process. They are traditional questions we ask every time without taking them so helpful, but they are good to provide you answer.

These questions are also known as five Ws plus One H: Who?, What?, Where?, When?, Why?, and How?

They are also called journalists' questions as it’s a journalist’s job to questions.

We often have ideas but are stuck and can’t explore various aspects of them. But when we put that idea to the journalists’ questions, everything becomes quite clear. These questions can help you with every type of writing. Whether you are writing a story or an article full of facts, these questions help you.

For example, if you are writing a fictional story and don’t how to write it, you can take help from the journalists’ questions such as (What is the story about? Who is the protagonist? What is the central theme? Where will the story be set? How will I start or end it? Etc.)

It can also help you in writing articles of any sort. For example, you are writing a political commentary about the recent development in Afghanistan and don’t know where to start and what to write.

So you can ask these questions such as (Who took over Afghanistan? Where is Ashraf Ghani? Who are the Taliban? What was the struggle about? Why Taliban take over Kabul? Why America evacuated? etc.)

Here is how to use it?

• What: ask questions such as what is the topic? What are the related issues to the topic? What is the necessity of the subject? What problems will it address or create?
• When: When the issue started, or when will something appear? When will something happen? When is something needed to be eliminated or added?
• Who: Who is involved in the story or the issue? Who are the prominent actors? Who is at the core of the problem? Who causes the pain? Who will be affected?
• Where: Where is something happening? Where is someone? Where is the missing link in the chain of the event?
• Why: Why am I writing this? Why is someone involved or participating in some things? Why do certain things cause problems? Why do people like or don’t like it? Why someone dies?
• How: How is the problem related to others? How to determine the significant sources of the issues? How will the problem be solved? How will the hero reach his goals? How will the readers discover a secret in a story?

Wrapping it up

One cannot write without a break. But some breaks often break the writing habit. Once you get that gap, it can spin into a block — writer’s block, which all writers experience with no distinction of big or small.

All the writers hate to be stuck in the middle of a beautifully written story or article. It happens. We all hate it. And sometimes, it’s disappointing to the core that we can’t get out of it.

And sometimes, we struggled with how to approach a particular topic. We don’t know from where to start and how to start. That puzzle is always there, and a writer is liable to face it.

But we can cure that domineering temperament that renders us useless by certain writing practices. There are tools and techniques that various prominent writers have used and recommended, but the methods which I have brought to you are tested.

I use them more than often. Not only to break the writer’s block but to prevent it. I also use it to sharpen my writing skills. It also helps me clarify ideas and organize them. It provides me with ways to approach a topic from a different perspective.

These techniques are called prewriting techniques, which are not exhaustive. A little revise here:

• Use the Listing technique that is a monster technique for generating new ideas. Brainstorm everything and write everything that comes your mind’s way.
• The clustering technique helps you visualize things. It is also called mind mapping. Map out your following potential ideas with clustering techniques. It’s fun.
• Don't know what to write? That’s good. Start freewriting. Write as much as you can and anything without thinking of correction, editing, or thinking. It’s a vehicle without breaks and jumps. Take the ride.
• The looping technique is best when you tire of literary rumbling in the wilderness. Pick up an interesting topic/idea from the freewriting draft and give vent to what you have.
• Done that? Question it. If you can’t start anything, you haven’t questioned it. Once you strike the nerve of the topic by asking it, it gives you space to create.