Four Strategies for Finding Writing Ideas

If you want to get published, you have to write quality pieces that are fresh, vivid, different, and yet accessible and universal. You also have to write a lot: both to get noticed, and to get better. If you want to be prolific and yet continue to write better, you can't afford to run out of ideas. Ideas are the foundation and the fountain of great writing.

Pam Allyn is an American literacy expert and author. In the YouTube clip below, listen to Pam Allyn explaining the four sources of writing ideas. In this clip she is teaching others how to teach writing to their students.



In this clip, Pam Allyn says:

The truth is, all great writing ideas come from wondering, observation, imagination, remembering.

Also:

All of us have the capacity for all of those things. What gets in our way a lot of the time is a fear of 'nobody's gonna to listen to me', 'nobody's gonna hear me', 'nobody really sees me', 'nobody really understands me'. 'Someone's gonnna laugh at me'. 'Someone's not gonna trust my idea'.

This is very sound, yet very simple advice. We all have the capacity, if not the responsibility, to look around (observation) this world and wonder. Remembering is the observation of the past, refined by the subconcious. It is a fantastic source of writing ideas. Imagination is the ignition source of much great writing.

Think about your writing:

• Do you rely primarily on only one or two of the four strategies?
• How will you start exploiting the strategies that you've been neglecting?
• Do you allow the kinds of fear that Pam Allyn discusses to get in your way?
• Identify one thing that you're going to change about your writing after listening to what Pam Allyn had to say and pondering your own writing process.

Use the comments below to share your own thoughts about the Four Strategies for Finding Writing Ideas.