Braindumping As Pre-Writing?
Image by Lubos Houska from Pixabay
Sometimes when I’m starting a story, I have a very clear picture of what it will look like. But other times, I have vague ideas and I need to do a bit of brainstorming in order to get to a point where I can start writing the story. In some cases, this involves braindumping, too.
Whereas brainstorming is thinking of the ideas, braindumping, for me, is a form of pre-writing, where I write down (or type up, more often) what I know about the story–every little bit of it. And then, as I organize and refine that information, I get to the brainstorming part, where I find the connections in what I have and flesh them out a bit more with “what ifs” and “maybes.”
Some of what I come up with during a braindump/storm won’t actually make it into the story, because as I work through the direction those ideas point, I find problems with them or decide that a different direction is more interesting to me. I’m trying to get better about keeping track of what I’ve thought about and discarded so that I don’t wind up in the same place a few minutes, hours, days, or weeks later.
Using this braindumping technique does take up some of my writing time. But I think that by getting things sorted out at the beginning, rather than midway through a story when I’ve realized I have no idea what I’m doing, I end up saving some time later on. It’s got similarities to outlining, but it feels organic enough that I think people who are allergic to outlining might find some use in this braindumping as well!
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