Generate Endless Ideas with Loop Writing
If you need help landing on a topic, add a comment, go to the chat, or shoot me a message. I’ll be glad to help you get started. If you are trying to create consistency with your writing or just want to start writing, subscribe to Everyone Can Write!
Loop writing consists of 5 rounds of writing. You can decide on how much time, but I like to try for 5 minutes for each round. As you try it at home, you will be able to decide the right amount of time for you. If five minutes sounds long, you will be surprised. I couldn’t believe how fast it went. Join the chat to ask questions or share your writing.
1. Choose a topic.
2. Write down your first thoughts and prejudices about the topic?
Put down whatever comes to mind about your topic. Try using narrative thinking. Write your thoughts in the form of a story about what’s happening in your head: “When I think of this topic, what first comes into my mind is a feeling that…Then I think of …Then it occurs to me that… Please give yourself permission to go along with your preconceptions.
3. Quickly list moments, stories, and people important to your topic.
Quickly list the moments or situations you can think of that somehow seem connected to your topic.
Quickly list the stories or sequences of event sthat come to mind in connection with your topic.
Quickly list any peope who somehow seem central to your topic.
4. Look over your list, choose at least one from each category, and write for 5 to 10 minutes about it.
Write for five minutes
5. Write a dialogue with yourself. First choose someone to have it with. The person can be real, fictitious, living or dead, someone you know well or someone you’ve never met.
Write for five minutes
6. Change the audience you are writing to, change your identity as the writer, or write about your topic as though you were living in the future or a different time period in the past.
Choose one or two people you would enjoy sharing thoughts with.
Try writing about your topic as though you were living in the future or some period in the past.
Vary your identify as the writer. Pretend that you are someone different who is writing about the same topic.
Write for five minutes
7. Lies, errors, and sayings
write statements about your topic that are obviously and flatly wrong
write statements that are almost right
write sayings, short pieces of useful wisdom in which a lot of meaning is crammed into a pithy and memorable “saying.”
Write for five minutes
8. How was that process? What process was most helpful in expanding your thinking?
Write for five minutes.
This was fun! Saving to use during my actual writing time. Thanks for sharing the narrative writing tip because I think that's been missing for me and my writing when I go to work on my project.