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- get a large piece of newsprint paper and crayons or colored marking pens. you may not use typing/printer paper and writing pens. you need to think big.
- print the topic of your article in the middle of a piece of paper. draw a circle around the words. add ten lines straight out from the circle, or the first bubble. you have made what looks like a child's drawing of the sun with words in the center.
- without censoring yourself in any way, print ten subtopics that are somehow related to your main topic. circle them too. that's it. simple and powerful.
- do not stop with seven or nine. you must brainstorm until you have ten or more topics on that paper.
- sit back and look at the fresh ideas the system produced. read the ideas out loud.
- after you've looked over your second bubbles, select those that seem to be sufficient to support an entire article. (a small, simple topic might not be sufficient to propose for a 2000-word article. it might be better in a 200-word article.)
- create seven to nine. if you cannot comfortably include seven, return to step 1 or consider doing some more research to learn about your proposed topic. choose your favorite for the next assignment.
- take each of the sub-bubbles individually and bubble again. with this "go round" you're actually outlining your article and will come up with seven to ten topics. these are the main points of your article. they may actually be the topics of the article's paragraphs.
- you may want to bubble "down" further and outline sub-sub-Bubbles.
- after you've made your bubbles and like the focus of the article, put the entire thing away for a day or so, if you can. try not to consciously think about the bubbles during this time and I promise your brain will be silently mulling up massive loads of creativity.
- let it cool down. after a day or two, and without looking at the previous bubbles, go back and repeat the entire method.
- finally, compare the two. then put the material in list form. you'll have a map to take you to the completion of your article.
feb 8 2018 ∞
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feb 8 2018 +