How to Brainstorm a Story

The art of brainstorming is one of the great things from formal education.

Do you recall brainstorming?

This is when you allow your mind to flow wherever to generate ideas.

A target is needed.

Without a target, a brainstorming session can easily turn into a dwelling session.

With a target, innovative ideas flow in one stream.

In this post, we are going to learn how to brainstorm a story.

Nowadays, with the world getting busier by the day, it’s smart to present information in a story format.

People don’t want to be swarmed with random data points.

People now have the ‘so what?’ mentality.

A mentality that gears you to become more creative, clear, and dynamic in your delivery.

The #1 Recipe of Successful Brainstorming

It’s highly important to make sure that you eliminate judgment.

Not just turn down judgment…

But eliminate it.

This may be a tall order.

Especially considering the fear of being judged is one of the larger fears out there.

Now you are just supposed to magically suspend it?

For the most part, this may be difficult.

This is why you want to segment some time to strictly brainstorm.

When you segment out a portion of your day to strictly be creative, you’re indicating to the mind:

‘Look, homie. You can do all your worrying later. But now, we are fearless.’

This is especially important if you are brainstorming with a team.

The last thing you want to do is shoot down people’s ideas too fast.

If you do shoot it down, do it in a gentle way so they can still be fearless.

The reason that this step is crucial is because our ideas expand when our emotions are working along with us.

You’re the only person on the planet….

Move like that in your brainstorming sessions.

Start General

The main point of your story serves as the skeleton.

This is what sets the foundation for the rest of the talk.

Did you know that popular author, R.L Stine of the Goosebumps series wrote over 300+ books?

Do you know what his strategy was?

‘No, what was it?’

He thought of the title first.

Once he thought of the title, he had a bird’s eye view of the theme of the book.

With the theme, he tackled the outline.

After the outline, he tackled each chapter.

Note, he did not start off with the chapters.

That restricts the creativity of the story.

Instead, start off general.

What is your story about?

Can you explain it in 15 seconds?

If you can explain it in 15 seconds, can you try 10 seconds?

What is the title of your talk?

Envision a tree.

A tree = trunk, branches, and leaves.

The trunk represents the general target that you are brainstorming towards.

For the sake of example, let’s brainstorm a story together.

• My title is: “Jeopardy Island.”

This is a story about people on an island who are in jeopardy of dying. The game plan is to find a way to escape.

Super general.

The more general it is, the more creativity I can leverage.

That’s how to brainstorm a story in the beginning.

Machine Gun Ideas

At this point, we have a target our mind is flowing to.

Emotions are a huge help with brainstorming sessions.

Hard to explain, but they serve as a compass on where to flow.

If your body is resonating with a certain idea, but you can’t logically explain it…

Write it down anyways.

Ask questions later.

In this stage, we want to be like a machine gun, not a bow and arrow.

A machine gun fires off rapidly.

While a bow and arrow fires off one at a time in a steady manner.

By firing off rapidly, you don’t give yourself time to judge yourself.

Shoot!

So, Jeopardy Island.

What are some of the factors that work with this story?

Since I am writing this, I’m going to give a brain dump right now.

It may not make much sense. Oh well. No judgment.

Characters:

Girl, boy, Jazmine, Pablo, Ricky, Fish character, Demon character.

Conflicts:

There is a bomb on the island that is about to fire off.

All the characters hate each other.

What happens:

The characters experiment.

Bring different things to the table.

Engineer, doctor, Gilligans Island.

Unfortunately, they don’t make it.

As you can tell, I’m writing a bunch of ideas that I think will work.

There is not much beauty to it. That’s fine.

The machine gun is not about beauty.

Next Layer of Machine Gun

In a logical world, I would be beginning the bow and arrow refining process.

But creativity does not conform to the rules of logic.

We are going to be firing off another machine gun round.

You can keep doing machine gun rounds as long as you want.

The reason I say to do it again is that the first time you may have been getting warmed up.

Athletes often stretch before game time.

View the first round as a stretch.

Let it fly one more time.

Polish Ideas

At this point, you have formed plenty of ideas.

Now it’s a game of polishing everything up.

Polishing does not mean fixing up your grammar or anything like that.

Instead, envision yourself as a Pokemon collector.

Find the ideas that resonate the most with the title, then collect that.

In this step, you are being a tad bit more tactical.

Earlier, you fired off all the bullets.

Now you’re picking up a few bullets that you would like to breathe life back into.

Yep, you have access to futuristic technology like that.

By the process of collecting your top ideas, you can do another refining process later.

Which ideas you collect are beyond the scope of this article.

How you structure the ideas is beyond the scope of the article.

Just know that you started off with nothing.

Now you have much more ideas for your story.

That’s how to brainstorm a story.

• General to machine gun to polishing.

Bring Your Stories to Life

Structuring a story becomes easier when you have the pieces of the puzzle beforehand.

In this case, it’s a game of letting your creativity do the talking.

Once you bring the story to life, just know that brainstorming is what made that possible.

“In Jeopardy Island, there was a strange assortment of characters. A demon, a girl engineer, a doctor who happened to have a fish head. Despite them being different, they had one thing in common. Escape the island in 4 hours or be the victims of a heinous bomb explosion. The 3 characters temporarily put their differences aside. The girl used her engineering methods to build a small engine. The doctor worked to build a mini boat that the engine could be attached to. The demon was the lazy one who didn’t put in much work. Due to the demon not helping out, the girl engineer and the fish head doctor were not capable of picking up the slack. Unfortunately, the 3 did not make it. The 3 died a slow death. Sorry folks, not all stories have a happy ending.”

This was a mock story that wrote itself because I had ideas beforehand.

You know how to brainstorm a story.

Now tell stories.

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– ArmaniTalks