Chapter 5: Some More Exercises To Get The Creative Ideas Flowing

Maybe all that you need to come up with an idea for an article or short story is to get started with the first line of a sentence.

Here are some sentences and trigger phrases I have put together so you can build upon or get ideas from in order to create your own.

When all else fails ...

How to ....

If I had it to do over again I'd ....

How I learned about ....

Surviving the .....

I thought it was a dream, but then I discovered that ...

I don’t need to sleep anymore as I’ve found the secret to …..

The best part of waking up is ......

I just saved a ton of money ....

You can see that I was starting to have a little fun here, especially with the last two being take-offs on television commercials. Have fun with these and if you come up with any really good endings please post them in the comments.

Another exercise that you can do to stimulate creative thinking is to take two words that start with the same letter of the alphabet and link them together as a title using words such as of, and, the, etc. Or don’t even put any words with them such as the third example below.

Some examples would be as follows:

The antagonism of aardvarks.

The beligerance of buffoons.

Apathetic Accuracy.

Blundering break-dancers.

These are just a handful of some of the crazy yet creative ideas that you can come up with. In addition the process of doing this can help to increase your language skills as you may find yourself pulling out the dictionary to look up more words that start with a certain letter of the alphabet. In doing so you can check their meaning and learn new uses of the word.