Expert tips: Getting your creative writing juices flowing

Tapping into your creativity when under pressure is a daunting task, but there are many simple writing and idea-generation techniques that you can use to ease the pain.

Have you ever struggled to come up with creative, attention-grabbing copy to match that brilliant email campaign strategy you spent a week conceiving? It happens. After countless hours planning something, you can hit a creative wall when it's time to actually do that thing.

Sometimes you're overwhelmed with research material. Sometimes you're bogged down by the stress of aggressive deadlines. Sometimes your mental gas tank is just plain empty.

In this post, I'll share four of my favorite and most effective pre-writing creativity techniques to help you get ideas down. Just like the importance of stretching before a workout, think of these techniques as a mental warm-up before you write your first draft.

Before you begin: Analog or digital?

All of my early stage ideas and writing is done in analog—with pen and paper—before hitting the computer for my first draft.

I prefer this for several reasons:

• Promotes singular focus: There are no toolbars or tabs, I'm not bogged down by hundreds of settings and formatting options, I'm not constantly interrupted by notifications, and I don't fall prey to aimless surfing. There's only me, my pen, and a blank page. Free from digital distractions, I have a better chance to focus on a single task or idea.
• It's very freeing: When I'm trying to be creative, I don't think in a straight line. I don't work from left to right and top to bottom. My creative process is very unstructured. I scribble left-to-right and right-to left. I scribble in the margins; sometimes there are no margins. I doodle a bunny that ends up looking like a tiger. I write things that make no sense. It's hard to simulate this freeing lack of rules on a computer.
• There's less results-driven pressure: No matter what app I use, I'm cursed with a sense of finality. It always feels like a final product. Even brainstorming apps that are meant to give you a blank canvas to generate ideas produce things that look equally at home as a business presentation. But on paper, "final" and "perfect" don't even enter into the equation. It looks gloriously messy and feels like the intermediate step that it is. The informal nature of analog writing creates a far more relaxed atmosphere for creativity.
• "The feeling": This one's tough to describe. I simply enjoy the tactile experience of writing with a nice pen in a quality notebook—it becomes almost meditative. I simply don't get the same sensory engagement when trying to create early ideas on a computer.

But this is a very personal preference; maybe it's not for you. If you're accustomed to a screen and keyboard, do it. Or maybe a tablet is your creative buddy. These are simply tools. Tools aid the process; the process creates the product. It's about finding something that aids your process.

An old software developer colleague, despite his technical acumen, preferred using a large whiteboard to figure out complex designs. After hours of scribbling, his whiteboard would be completely covered with sketches rivaling a complex Ocean's casino heist blueprint.

So, let's get started.

Technique #1: Freewriting

This is one of my favorite pre-writing warm-ups: Select a topic to write about. It can be related to the email campaign you're working on or something completely unrelated.

Once you have your topic, write everything you can think of—without stopping. Don't lift your pen from the page or your fingers from the keys. Don't even worry about correct punctuation and grammar. If you start running out of ideas, write "Oh no! I'm running out of ideas…" Just keep writing.

Much of what you end up with will likely be unusable, but that's not the point. The point is to get ideas flowing. And if something is usable, that's a bonus.

Technique #2: Brainstorming

This creativity technique is very similar to freewriting—but less structured.

Like freewriting, you write non-stop without worrying about punctuation and grammar. The only difference is that you don't need to focus on a single topic. Write about anything that pops into your head, even if the ideas are completely unrelated.

Serious, goofy, profound, mundane… Don't discard any ideas; write them all down. Your goal is to ignore the critical part of your brain, ignore the rules of writing, and ignore doubt and judgment.

Free from the structured approaches that have been ingrained in us—especially in the business world—you can come up with unconventional ideas that your "sensible self" usually keeps at bay.

Technique #3: Listing

I love lists… I make lists on how to improve my lists.

During the creative process, I use lists to create categories of words and short sentence snippets that I can eventually use to write my first draft on the computer.

For example, let's say you're creating an email campaign to launch a new product. You can create several lists and jot down words and sentences related to your company's brand and history, your product's features, your product's benefits, your target audience, and any other relevant categories.

You don't need to use all the words and sentences in these lists. They're simply the building blocks to your copy.

Technique #4: Mind mapping

Similar to listing, mind mapping helps you come up with potential words. But it does so in a non-linear fashion.

You place your primary word/idea in the middle and draw a circle or box around it. Then you continue writing down words/ideas related to that central theme, creating a spider web-like diagram that provides you with a visual, non-linear overview of your words/ideas and how they relate with one another.

Mind mapping is one of the few creativity techniques that I prefer doing on the computer instead of paper. Software, such as SimpleMind (one of my favorites), lets you move and reorder entire sections from one branch to another—something you can't do on paper without creating a mess.

Image Credit: SimpleMind

Closing thoughts…

When your ideas aren't flowing, you can wait for inspiration to hit or you can grind away. Neither are particularly effective. The former rarely happens at opportune times; the latter can be counterproductive because the harder you try, the worse it can get.

But with some proper warm-up, you can get yourself into the proper headspace to create and discover le mot juste, the perfect words and phrases to express exactly what you're trying to convey.