1. Use your senses.

If you have already identified the topic that you want to write about, it will help if you will try to list sense details related with your topic—smell, taste, touch, sound, and sight. This will help you get into the topic and supply you with vivid details for the draft. Our senses connect our mind to the world around us, so by recalling sense impressions you can recreate the subject for yourself, engaging brains and feelings, and stirring subconscious memories. Drenching yourself in sense impressions is enjoyable once you catch on—one of the secret pleasures of most professional writers.

2. See the topic from alternative viewpoints

This brainteaser gives you perspective by making you see the topic from outside your own narrow viewpoint. This is another secret of honest writing. When using alternative viewpoints, you must try to see the topic as someone else would, to inhabit another’s mind and eyes for a little while and not impose your views on others. It helps open your own eyes.

3. Break stereotypes, unquestioned ideas, and slogans

Stereotypes, unquestioned ideas, and slogans are enemies of creativity—blocks that prevent honest, imaginative thinking. All three encourage us to think in accepted, common patterns—which as you know is not really thinking.

4. Classify your topic.

Classifying breaks a subject into categories ad places individuals in each category. In a classification brain teaser, break your subject down into categories several times until you come up with a creative pattern.

5. Compare and Contrast your topics.

You can get more ideas by comparing your topic with something else. This is another basic way people think. We contrast socialism with capitalism, murder with manslaughter, retailing with wholesaling, the Yankees with the Mets.

6. List Examples

This brain teaser provides you with some details on the topic you are write about. Simply list all the specific examples about the topic you can think of. This brain teaser tells you quickly which topics you don’t know enough about before it’s too late.

7. Anticipate you audience

This brain teaser makes you think about how you reader may react to your topic. Answering the following questions may help:

-Who is my audience?

-What does my audience already know about the topic?

-What does my audience already believe about the topic?

8. Try a new mood

See your topic from a variety of moods. Be paranoid, frivolous, serious, energetic, or angry. It’s good to survey your feelings and put them into writing.

9. Seek paradox

Most people run from contradictions, but the honest writer knows the opposite of what he or she writes can be strongly supported too. Paradox is the simultaneous existence of opposites or contradictions. Seeking paradox means avoiding the superficial.