Brainstorming? Try These 7 Creative Ways to Gather Ideas
How to jumpstart your writing project whether you have one idea or too many
Published in
6 min readMar 5, 2021
Advertising executive Alex F. Osborn was the first to invent formal brainstorming techniques. He became frustrated by his team’s ability to generate creative ideas for their campaigns.
Osborn launched group creativity sessions that allowed team members to suggest spontaneous new ideas without criticism. Participants “used the brain to storm a problem,” and dubbed their gatherings as “brainstorming sessions.”
That was in 1939.
Since then, brainstorming has become a standard part of the creative process both for teams and for individuals. As for writers, we use brainstorming techniques for two key reasons:
- When you have no (or few) ideas. The blank page mocks you and you’re drawing a blank. Or you’re stressed out, wiped out, or worn out and you need inspiration. When you’ve got nothing — or very little — you can use brainstorming techniques to gather a pool of ideas for content and generate a large number of ideas in a short amount of time. Another scenario you may use brainstorming is …
- When you have too many ideas. Brainstorming techniques are helpful when you need to dump the contents in your…
