Writers Block And The Coffee Brainstorm

Good Ole writer’s block, you know we all get it, if you don’t think you get it, and then you’re probably not a writer. Writing is not easy, and often can be a daunting task to communicate our ideas, or create something on a dime. Creativity, and information often take some coaxing to come out of their hole deep in your minds cavities, to help this happen authors often use brainstorming techniques. Rather then list off a bunch of techniques you may not care to hear about, or understand, the topic of coffee will serve as an example of how to brainstorm. There are four major steps to this brainstorming session. Identify the topic, come up with your expertise, also known as the angle, make assertions about the topic, and organize your thoughts in a clear readable pattern.
Identify topic and you will have the catalyst for this exercise. The topic I identified is coffee, since it would be one many could relate to, and thus follow the author’s point of view from idea, to finished product. Once the topic is identified, then you can establish your expertise, or your angle from which you choose to write.
Establishing your expertise on the topic is more factual then anything else. For the topic of coffee, where would you fall into the expert category? If the answer is no where, then where would you have more experience then say the average person? For me the answer is drinking coffee. I don’t make coffee; I don’t grow the beans, or own a coffee farm. I also do not sell coffee, or market it, or use it in any way for profit. So I can’t write about that as an authority. But, I do drink coffee, oh do I drink coffee. I wouldn’t start my day without coffee, and better yet, I purchase it from all over the place. Sometimes I brew my own, other times I buy from this cafe, or that cafe, or this coffee house, etc. Once I have established that my expertise comes from consuming coffee on a higher then average level, I can now move on to creating a position, or angle for my piece.
Making assertions about drinking coffee is not difficult. Think about it, what do most people write about when dealing with coffee drinkers? The answer overwhelmingly is taste. I could write an e-book reviewing coffee companies coffee in terms of taste, price, and anything else that would be worthy of a review dealing with coffee. Therefore my angle or specific purpose will be to review coffee from an enthusiast’s perspective.
Once you have achieved the above, it’s time to organize your thoughts into a format. What does that mean specifically? It means short, to the point paragraphs or chapters offering readers something they couldn’t get elsewhere. So, for example, we could do 10 chapters each on a coffee house selling gourmet coffee. By making the topic more detailed, we will have less trouble organizing our work, the more detailed the piece is, the easier it will be to organize it. Now the final aspect of the organization will be to assign each chapter a set of needs that should be met. Such as discussing the taste, cost, and extras each coffee house offered. Once we establish this pattern it can be carried out over and over again for each new chapter until our work is done.