Growing up, the house my family lived in had a well out back. We could lower a bucket into the well to draw water, but the well had a pump too. If the pump had lain dormant for several hours, we had to prime the pump to draw water—my brother and I moved the handle up and down to increase the water pressure so that water would come flowing out of the spicket. As we moved the pump handle, we could feel the pressure mounting. This would excite us, and we’d pump faster, even as the pumping also got harder. We were rewarded with a gush of water from the spicket; the sudden release of the water also meant that the act of pumping was immediately easier.

Prewriting is all about priming the pump.

So many student writers that I work with don’t see the point of “brainstorming”—they just want to get to the writing. But pre-writing, or brainstorming, is part of that writing process. Just like I had to prime the pump as a kid—which meant going through the motion of actually pumping water even though no water came out—we all have to prime our writing pumps.

Prewriting means that you don’t have to sit and wait for ideas to come to you. Just like priming the pump took work, generating ideas takes work too. Here are five prewriting strategies to get your ideas flowing.

Listing

We make lists for lots of things in life—things we need to do, items we plan to buy, people we want to contact. Listing can also be an effective prewriting activity.

Do you need a potential paper topic? You can list topics covered in class that you want to learn more about. Do you keep a blog? You can list common questions or common points of interest that your readers might want to know more about. Do you need support for your argument? You can list the kinds of evidence that your particular audience will find convincing. Are you writing a cover letter? You can list examples from your work experience that showcase your skills to a potential employer. Do you need to generate material for description? One of my favorite prewriting activities to do in the writing center with students who are writing narratives or descriptions is to list the five senses in five columns and then ask students about the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, or feelings/touch associated with whatever event, place, person, or thing they’re trying to depict. They always walk away excited about all the material they have to craft into a memorable description!

You are in no way obligated to use everything you generate for your list. Circle the items that have potential or that you want to develop further, and feel free to discard the remaining items.

Clustering

Once you have a topic, the next thing to do is look for deeper connections.

Clustering is all about making free associations between items. Put your topic in the middle of a piece of paper, draw an oval around it, and then draw lines out from the center, filling in new ovals with appropriate subtopics or details as they come to mind. You can also write questions that you have about those topics and subtopics. Keep branching off these ovals as new ideas flow to you.

Let’s say you’ve been asked to write a blog series for your writing center aimed at graduate students on how to write literature reviews. You put “literature reviews” in the middle of the paper, and link it to another bubble that says “questions grad students have about lit reviews” and another that says “my observations about what grad students struggle with when writing lit reviews.” You then start listing your observations and common questions grad students bring about lit reviews to the writing center. As you write, you realize that you can add another bubble on “common things I tell graduate students about lit reviews.” You realize that these questions, observations, and advice can be sorted into three bigger categories of genre, writing style, and process. You now have several options for mapping out how you want your blog series to be organized—and how many individual blog entries you want to write!

Questioning

Asking questions taps into curiosity, which can spark creativity. But not all questions are created equal. You don’t want to ask closed-ended questions—the kind of questions that lawyers ask to witnesses on the stand that can just be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ You want to ask open-ended questions—the kinds of questions that make it easier to generate narrative, story, and content. Asking journalistic questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how is one way to generate open-ended questions.

For an example, let’s say that one of the jobs you’re applying to requires customer service experience. You could ask yourself questions like the following:

• What do I believe good customer service looks like? How have I exhibited those qualities in giving customer service?

• How have I addressed customer concerns with x?

• How have I reacted to difficult customers? Why have I reacted in those ways?

• When have I not provided good customer service?

• What is a particular example of good customer service from my experience?

• Where do I send a customer if I cannot help them? How do I decide that I cannot help a customer or deal with a customer?

At this point, you’re just asking questions, not answering them—and some questions might spark more questions. Answering the questions comes in our next prewriting activity.

Free Writing

The object of free writing is simply to keep your pen moving—or your fingers typing—even if you feel like you have nothing to say. You can write “blah blah” or “I don’t know what to write next” until a new idea comes to you. The act of writing will help you generate ideas. In some cases, this can also be thought of as “stream of consciousness writing.”  

If you’ve generated questions about customer experience, then you can then start free writing those answers. Or, if you’re writing a process essay—an essay that describes how you do something—then you can start free writing as you remember the different steps: What is the process for driving a stick shift? For making collard greens? For diagnosing a car engine problem?   

It is important to remember that free writing is not actually drafting—you’re still generating materials and playing with ideas to see what comes out, and so you’re not obligated to keep any of the ideas you’ve written or include all those ideas in your draft.

The next prewriting activity can help you move towards drafting your manuscript.

Reverse-Outlining

So let’s say you’ve done one, or all, of the pre-writing activities that I’ve described above. Your next step is to look at what you generated and re-organize it.

If you generated materials for a description, you can read over your writing and group like phrases and items together, and then put them in an order that works best for your purposes. For a process essay, you can go through and number the steps you put down to take stock of any missing steps or steps that are out of order. If you started answering your questions about your customer service experience, you probably found a lot of redundancy—but in that redundancy, themes emerge that you can use to organize your cover letter in a way that communicates what values drive your philosophy of customer service.

Once you’ve taken stock of what you have, you can re-order it, and then shape it into a draft.

Conclusion – the Value of Conversation

Each of these prewriting activities can be done on their own, but they can also be conducted with someone else. Talking about ideas is a good way to generate them. Some people are oral processors and so have to talk things out to understand them. However, even if you normally work alone, talking about your ideas with someone gives them a chance to ask questions and rephrase ideas back to you so that you can see if your ideas make sense.

Experiment and find out what works for you. You may find one activity more productive than another, or one easier to do than others, or one that you enjoy most. Remember: writing is work, so it is ok if ideas don’t come easily; your goal is to build a better writing process.