Tools For Writers How To Dramatically Expand Your Creativity

If you’re a writer, then being creative is essential. If you sit in front of a blank screen and can’t think of anything except what you’re planning on having for dinner, you won’t get far. Instead, you need to start letting the swirl of ideas come out and bleed all over the page like an overturned ink truck.
How do you make that happen? There are plenty of ways! Your brain is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets. But just like the muscles on your body, there are plenty of ways to strengthen it.
One powerful way is coming up with something called an ABC list. This takes a while to build up, but the results can be absolutely wonderful. Take a sheet of paper, or a blank sheet in your favorite word processor,and make a column with every letter in the alphabet.
Next is to choose a topic, like movies. Your next job is to think of a movie that starts with each letter of the alphabet, and write it next to the letter. If you get stuck, it’s OK to cheat, but don’t do it too often. Cheating is when you use the letter of the alphabet as the second or third letter in the title. For example, X, can be used in “X-Mas on 34th street” or something like that.
Try and fill out one new column every day. Just this by itself will do wonders for your lateral thinking ability. Once you’ve got about ten rows, try out the next part of the exercise.
Take the topic you are writing about and are stuck on. Let’s say somebody asked you to write an article about bananas. You can’t think of anything. So you look up “B” on your alphabet list. Then you look at all the words you’ve chosen for “B”. Next, you start free writing, that is writing everything that comes to mind regarding those words.
Whatever pops into your head, just let it out. You’ll be amazed at what you come up with, and the connections you start to make. If you do this exercise for five or ten minutes every day, you’ll become incredibly creative, and you’ll never be at a loss again.
Of course, this won’t work if you don’t do it. Just like a muscle will get weak if you don’t use it, this amazing method will get weak if you only think about last night’s dinner.