Garbled Thoughts: 10 Minute Brainstorm

My Chronic Fatigue is in high gear at the moment, but I actually have a thing to talk about which I find really useful. So, I’m sorry if this blog post is coming across as confused, but I am extremely confused right now. Disability. I hate it.

10 minutes.

That’s the thing we’re talking about today.

I follow this author podcast and the dude on that is doing prep for writing a novel on the podcast. An intimidating prospect to be sure but one of the things of his prep that interested me greatly was this:

Sit down and brainstorm for ten minutes. Do this for everything.

Over the last week, I have done these ten minute brainstorms for characters, during which I learned that one of my characters was a social activist prepper, and another loved to do magic tricks… both of which I was overjoyed to learn. I’ve gone from having broad character archetypes to having people with chrunchily specific lives. I also now have a big old list of magical creatures, magical prisons, locations, artefacts and other ephemera.

A good half of what I came up with I could have generated through normal means, but there’s something about sitting down, throwing out all other distractions and just free associating for ten minutes which really yields good results. Particularly if your disability is preventing you from working in other areas.