Prewriting Techniques

Sensory Prompts
I use prompts to get the gears going, prompts from my rich life, cartoons, television shows, and movies that I've seen, prompts from pictures or a screen saver, vivid life long memories, magazines, nature, people in the mall, insects crawling in the garden, birds or clouds floating in the air, trees and squirrels fighting the blue jays, women I’ve loved and women that I’ve not gotten along with, friends, friend's problems, problems with friends, all sorts of interesting stuff will come up with prompts to inspire your lists and free writing. Audio learners should also include music and/or ambient sounds which are in sync or out of sync with the visual prompts, you could even burn incense, or spray air fresheners, perfumes, cologne, cooking smells if you wanted some fragrant stimulation. Certain tactile stimulations might help some people, a blanket, a teddy bear, a sword, a yo-yo, a pencil, toys to play with. I would avoid taste sensations, but if it works for you then go for it!  It’s fun and should not be considered work, but play. Be creative and entertain yourself, it's your little prewriting party, you might be surprised what may become useful material for your project. Don't really think about listing yet, just become stimulated, inspired, and enthusiastic about your pre-writing.

Listing - Freewriting
I usually start out with a listing method; pick something off that list then freewrite about it for two or three minutes. Pick another item off the list and do the same thing. This helps stop procrastination, generates some ideas, and begins a little structure and analysis of what must be done in order to complete a paper. Some of the items of the list don’t necessarily have to obviously pertain to the topic of your paper, start out with a wide margin concerning the general topic then narrow the items on the list down to your specific topic, title, or thesis statement.

Bubbling-Clustering-Doodling
Bubble some of the items from your lists, connect the bubbles, establish relationships between the bubbles, doodle, cluster bubbles and doodles together, then create an outline, not a formal outline just from the groups that you’ve doodled together, see how many you can fit into a one page outline. It’s a great exercise to spark the creative flow and inspiration to begin your project. Some people like music, or ambient sounds of waves, wind, forest in the background, the more stimulation you have the more likely you are to come up with something really good for your project, no matter how silly it may seem at the time, make notes about your thoughts as you play around with the lists and freewriting.

Post Pre-writing exercises
After about twenty minutes or so, stop and take a count, what subject was the most  or least abundant, were there any surprises? What is confusing or inclusive, what other questions might need to be answered here? How much of your freewriting was honest, did you do enough research yet? What parts are you uncomfortable with, do you need to clarify a few points in this dark zone?

The next unit will be reflection and sketching to a draft.