Brainstorming Guide for Writers

Traditional brainstorming rests on a false picture of what happens when you feel stuck.

It assumes the well is dry, that you sit and strain and eventually squeeze out ideas, and so it hands you techniques for generating more. But the well is almost never dry. The problem is that you’re killing them faster than you can notice them, and once you understand that, the whole approach to getting unstuck changes.

More books have died to the dry-well myth than to any lack of talent, in my view. People sit in front of a blank page convinced they’ve run out, when their heads are full of ideas they won’t let live. It’s a sad way to lose a book, because the material was sitting right there. This course teaches idea generation as a problem of removing interference instead of adding effort. Your mind is already producing ideas constantly. The work is learning to let them survive long enough to use.

Empty is really afraid

When writers describe being stuck, they reach for the language of emptiness. My mind is blank. Nothing comes to me. I have no ideas. The words point at absence, as if the creative supply had run out.

This is almost never what’s happening. The brain is a pattern-making machine that can’t stop connecting things, imagining scenarios, throwing up possibilities. You have ideas about your stuck project right now, maybe dozens of them.

What feels like emptiness is rejection happening too fast to see. Ideas arise and get shot down at the speed of thought, dismissed before they fully form. That’s stupid. That’s been done. Nobody would care about that. The idea exists for a fraction of a second and vanishes, and you experience the rapid-fire killing as blankness. The well is full. There’s a guard at the top shooting everything that tries to come up, so fast you never see the thing that got shot.

The guard at the top of the well is the best image on this page, and I wish more writers could see it in themselves. Once you notice the shooting, you start catching yourself mid-dismissal, and that alone frees up a surprising amount of material. Once you know the stuckness is rejection and not absence, you stop trying to generate harder and start trying to interfere less.

Watch: How to Come Up with ORIGINAL Story Ideas [Brainstorming Method], Reedsy

Perfectionism wears the disguise of standards

The guard doing the shooting is usually perfectionism, and it’s effective because it disguises itself as good taste. It doesn’t feel like fear.

It feels like having high standards, like knowing quality, like refusing to waste time on weak ideas. But at the generation stage, that discernment is fatal, because it kills ideas before they’ve had any chance to develop into something.

The idea that sounds stupid at the moment it appears is often the seed of the best thing you’ll write. Perfectionism shoots it in its first second of life.

The cure is to separate generating from judging, completely and deliberately.

When you’re generating, judgment is off. All of it. Every idea gets to exist and get written down, however weak it looks at first glance. The evaluation comes later, as a separate act, after you have a pile of raw material to work with. This is hard because perfectionism insists that judging as you go is just being smart. It’s not.

It strangles the process at the only stage where quantity and freedom matter more than quality. Learning to silence the judge on demand is most of the skill. Perfectionism is the most convincing liar in a writer’s head, and I’ve got a special contempt for how it passes itself off as taste. Taste belongs in revision. During generation it’s a bouncer turning away everyone who might have become the life of the party.

Early ideas are fragile on purpose

Ideas are most vulnerable at the moment they appear, before they’ve developed enough to defend themselves, and treating a newborn idea as if it should already be good is how you lose the ones that mattered. An early idea is supposed to be a starting point, a rough shape that becomes something through development. Judged by the standard of a finished idea, every early idea fails, so judging early kills everything.

So you learn to protect ideas in their fragile stage, giving them room to grow before you evaluate them.

When an idea appears, develop it a little. Ask what it could become. Follow it a few steps before deciding whether it’s any good. Most ideas only reveal their worth after some development. The ideas that sound worst at first are often the freshest, because they haven’t been seen before and so register as wrong.

Give the strange, awkward, seemingly-bad idea a chance to unfold, and you’ll find that a good share of your best material was hiding inside ideas you’d once have shot on sight.

The strange idea that feels wrong is the one I’d push a writer to chase first. Familiar ideas feel right because you’ve met them a hundred times, and that’s the exact reason readers will yawn at them.

Why your brain resists the risk

Underneath perfectionism is a simple fact: generating ideas freely feels risky, because a bad idea, even one only you ever see, tones to some part of the mind as a small failure to be avoided. The brain would rather produce nothing than produce something that might be wrong, and that’s why the guard exists at all. It’s protecting you from the tiny risk of a bad idea by preventing all ideas, a terrible trade but an understandable one.

Getting past it means making idea generation feel safe enough that the guard stands down. You do this by lowering the stakes to nothing, by generating in a space where bad ideas are allowed and expected, where the point is quantity and the worse the ideas the better you’re doing at the exercise.

I’m a big believer in deliberately bad brainstorming. Write twenty terrible ideas on purpose and the guard gets bored and wanders off, and somewhere in the back half of the list something real slips through.

When a bad idea costs you nothing and is even a sign the process is working, the risk that fed the perfectionism disappears, and the ideas your mind was producing all along finally get to surface. The well was never dry. You just have to stop shooting.

Using AI as an assistant here

The ideas are yours and the judgment about which ones to develop is the craft.

No tool has your taste or your vision. But a tool is useful as a way to lower the stakes of generation. You can use AI to produce a flood of rough possibilities you can react to, which is easier than facing a blank page, and reacting to options often unlocks your own ideas faster than generating cold.

You can have it play back variations on a fragile early idea so you can see where it might go before you judge it, or use it as a non-judging partner to think out loud with when your own internal guard is loud. It floods the field with raw material, and you choose what has life in it. Writers stuck for months have plenty of ideas, and it’s wrong that nobody told them sooner the guard was the problem.

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