Following Writing Exercises and Specific Amount of Ideas

This approach forces you to progress through an exercise rather than bailing out when you find something you like. See also: Writing Comedy to Timers .

It’s tempting to stop early once you’ve hit on a promising idea, but the point is to keep going. If you get a flash of something worth keeping, jot it down — just don’t let it derail the process. There’s a difference between quickly capturing an idea before it evaporates and abandoning the exercise entirely.

The discipline here is the same as writing to a timer: you commit, like in improv, but in a solo-writing context. If the exercise says “write at least 10 items/themes/variations,” the number matters. Around idea three or four your brain may stall — that’s when pushing on becomes valuable. Keep going without judging quality, writing down the obvious, the weird, or the next thing that pops up.

It’s also okay to write the “wrong” thing. Aim to follow the brief and prompt, but if something else leaps into your mind and spills out onto the page, that’s fine. Anything that makes you overly critical during brainstorming is worth avoiding — early judgement is the quickest way to choke creativity.

This does two things:

Gets you past your initial thinking ruts.
Builds the habit of writing bad ideas without self-censorship.

Combined with timed writing, this trains you to commit, to create without over-editing, and to get into a headspace where generating is easy. The goal of most warm-up writing exercises isn’t brilliance — it’s momentum.