How do Writers Get Ideas?

We are exploring the Pre-Writing stage of the Writing Process. This is when writers start thinking about something they'd like to write about, gather their ideas and start putting thoughts together about their next piece of writing.

We tried out a strategy called Word Association. You write down everything you can think of about a single word, in our case "ocean" and then use your associations to spark new ideas, and so forth. When we did it as a class, we quickly realized that each of us has different associations to the same word. To me, ocean might mean fun, exciting, summer, family. To someone else, ocean might spark thoughts of sharks, deep, dark, scary. We quickly realized that all this does is get your brain going and start making those associations until you get to an idea that you might want to write about.

The students then tried a word association of their with a word they picked out of a hat.