If you have ever been in a business class and learned about brainstorming strategies, this technique will look super familiar. I am just editing the process a little to make it more about songwriting. The idea is to take a word and then write associated words around it. Then that starts a mapping process where those associated words will have more associated words and so on. I will do one so that it makes sense. The easiest way to do it is in visual form, so your replies will likely be in picture form. We will spend a few days drawing out to various degrees. At the end, you will have a lot of words that all relate back, to some degree of separation, to the original words.
Here is how we will work this exercise. Pick up a book, any book. Skim through a random page and pick a word that jumps out at you. Then flip to a different page and do the same. Those two words will be our center circles. From there, you will draw a least 5 lines from each of those circles leading to empty circles and fill those words in with related words. Feel free to go out another degree of separation if something comes to mind. In the future exercises, we will use this same diagram and expand it further.
One note, it is ok to have adjectives and adverbs, but remember that nouns and verbs tend to be more powerful. Good luck and have fun!
Because I have terrible handwriting, I did mine on powerpoint to try to make it easier for you to see what it looks like. I also chose to color code it (again, just to help demonstrate). You do not have to do it digitally or color code it. In fact, it is probably easier, faster, and better to do it by hand and just post a picture, but that is up to you.
Great exercise! I have been realising the power of brainstorming more and more lately in my workflow, I see it as a paint palette where you can mix your paints up and try out all the colours before you start painting on the canvas.
It’s neat that you went with descriptors in one and mainly nouns in the other. That will make a fun day 2! Also, what program did you use? I used PowerPoint and Paint.
Thanks for pointing that out, I hadn’t actually paid attention to the word types, so interesting how they fell out naturally.
As for the program, it is called Scapple and I can not recommend it highly enough! I have actually been meaning to do a post about it in the meta section because I use it for pretty much all my songwriting these days. It is just a simple blank canvas that allows you to splash words onto it and move them around like a great big jigsaw.
