The technique for excavating things from your brain
I call it the brain dump, and I even have a note with the same name on my phone. But “brain drain” rhymes and is probably more attractive sounding than “brain dump.”
The brain drain is when you set aside some time and write. What do you write about? Literally anything in your brain. Whatever thoughts are coming to your head, including things like “I don’t know what to write about,” “why am I doing this,” and “I feel useless and not like a writer.” You don’t stop and think about what you’re writing until you’ve reached that point where you feel your brain drain is done.
I first learned this technique when I was doing NaNoWriMo. Writing 50k words in one month is no joke. And it’s all about the word count; editing is not encouraged until you’re done with the challenge. At the time, I struggled to write so many words daily — especially since I had chosen to do a fiction novel — something I had not written in at least five years. My character’s quotes? I felt like I used every synonym for “said” in the thesaurus.
So I was introduced to Write or Die. It’s still available, but it hasn’t been updated in four years, so I’m unsure how good it is now. But the idea was to input a word count goal and a time limit. You could choose the level you wanted and this affected how the site would react if you…
